[plug] rsync noob

[Sol]

I've just starting looking into rsync to synchronise a bunch of /etc 
files on clients from a server. I've read up on the documentation and it 
kinda makes sense. But I hit a snag and can't seem to find the answer 
either in the docs or in experimentation, despite it being a seemingly 
simple problem.

I've setup my rsyncd.conf and rsyncd.secrets on both clients and server 
(they're basically the same). I want to pull files from the server to 
client rather than push (as a cron job). Unfortunately I can only get 
the latter to work ATM.

This works on the server:
rsync -gopt --password-file=/etc/rsyncd.secrets /etc/hosts ws1::configs

But this won't work on the client:
rsync -avz --password-file=/etc/rsyncd.secrets gw::configs/hosts /etc/hosts
@ERROR:chroot failed
rsync connection unexpectedly closed

I tried switching chroot to false in rsyncd.conf, as well as commenting 
it out because I set uid & gid to root and thought I didn't need it. But 
it doesn't help with it switched on. (NB: with it switched off I get a 
somewhat different error message). I've been faithful to the examples in 
the Linux Administration Handbook and have a fairly simple 
configuration, and I'm not sure what the problem might be.

Any ideas?

a thousand thanks; sol :-)

-- 
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Sol Hanna
solATautonomonDOTnet