After playing around with Rsync for awhile, I have been able to get the daemon loaded on the whitney server and have created a script that can be executed on the shasta machine that copies one directory and all of it's subordinate directories over to the server.
This copy preserves all file attributes and on all subsequent copies will only copy what has changed.
Sounds easy, but it took quite a while to accomplish this. For the first hour I could not figure out how to execute a script. I eventually found out that the PATH variable was not set to include the bash shell.
Oh, I also had to select an appropriate shell to write the script in. After some reading it seems like bash will be my shell of choice.
Once I had the shell running, I was getting permission errors on the copy. I still have not resolved this issue but was able to get around it by having the same user who created the script have only their files copied over to their directory on the server.
Getting the script to run successfully allows me to ignore all of the parameters on the rsync command. I just need to continue to research the usage of groups. It seems simple, but what I am trying to do is not written anywhere where I can find it.
I am trying to create a user who only has the ability to copy files from one machine to the other. This user will not be able to execute anything but the script and maybe rsync. The problem is when this user tries to copy files that are not theirs I get a permission error. My thinking is that I could create a group that would be superior to the user groups that I would assign this one user to. This group level security would prevent this user from executing anything. Sadly, I can not find anything relating to a hierarchy of groups.
I'm beginning to think I am asking the wrong questions...