[rdiff-backup-users] Firewire external HDD + FAT32

[Jacob C]

Hello,

I recently purchased a maxtor 300 Gig, external firewire hard drive to use as network backup for my home office. I have it formatted as FAT32 so I can 
 access the data from both windows and linux (this is a neccessity). My home office is built of several boxes running Mandrake Linux and FreeBSD. I 
am trying to do remote backups in a 'pull' fashion, using SSH key exchanges from a linux server which has the firewire drive mounted as root.

Here's the problem (/mnt/backup is the mounted firewire drive):

address@hidden rdiff_backup]# rdiff-backup crypt-600::/tmp 
/mnt/backup/test-backup
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/rdiff-backup", line 23, in ?
    rdiff_backup.Main.Main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 254, 
in Main
    take_action(rps)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 226, 
in take_action
    elif action == "backup": Backup(rps[0], rps[1])
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 264, 
in Backup
    backup_init_dirs(rpin, rpout)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 322, 
in backup_init_dirs
    ErrorLog.open(Time.curtimestr, compress = Globals.compression)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/log.py", line 219, 
in open
    cls._log_fileobj = cls._log_inc_rp.open("wb", compress = compress)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/rpath.py", line 
803, in open
    if compress: return gzip.GzipFile(self.path, mode)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/gzip.py", line 94, in __init__
    fileobj = self.myfileobj = __builtin__.open(filename, mode or 'rb')
IOError: invalid mode: wb
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/rdiff-backup", line 23, in ?
    rdiff_backup.Main.Main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 254, 
in Main
    take_action(rps)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 224, 
in take_action
    connection.PipeConnection(sys.stdin, sys.stdout).Server()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/connection.py", 
line 347, in Server
    self.get_response(-1)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/connection.py", 
line 309, in get_response
    try: req_num, object = self._get()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/connection.py", 
line 225, in _get
    raise ConnectionReadError("Truncated header string (problem "
rdiff_backup.connection.ConnectionReadError: Truncated header string (problem 
probably originated remotely)
address@hidden rdiff_backup]#


On the remote server I have the following in my /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 
file (
The PYTHONPATH was added because rdiff-backup chokes w/o it):

command="PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages rdiff-backup --server --restrict-read-only 
/tmp",from="enigma-purple.entropy.gray",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty ssh-rsa AAAB3NzaC1yc2EA[...] address@hidden

My *guess* is that it's having problems with FAT32 (perhaps it's trying to maintain permissions?). It should be noted that if I run rdiff-backup to 
store the files on any other ext2 or ext3 drive it works perfectly, it's only when I run it on the firewire drive that I experience this problem.

Any suggestions/help is appreciated!
Jacob