csprotocol.txt

This is kind of informal and may be wrong, but it helped me.  It's
basically a summary of clientserver.c and authenticate.c.

 -- Martin Pool <mbp@samba.org>




This is the protocol used for rsync --daemon; i.e. connections to port
873 rather than invocations over a remote shell.

When the server accepts a connection, it prints a greeting

  @RSYNCD: <version>

where <version> is the numeric version; currently 24.  It follows this
with a free text message-of-the-day.  It expects to see a similar
greeting back from the client.

The server is now in the connected state.  The client can either send
the command

  #list

to get a listing of modules, or the name of a module.  After this, the
connection is now bound to a particular module.  Access per host for
this module is now checked, as is per-module connection limits.

If authentication is required to use this module, the server will say

  @RSYNCD: AUTHREQD <challenge>

where <challenge> is a random string of base64 characters.  The client
must respond with

  <user> <response>

where <user> is the username they claim to be, and <response> is the
base64 form of the MD4 hash of challenge+password.

At this point the server applies all remaining constraints before
handing control to the client, including switching uid/gid, setting up
include and exclude lists, moving to the root of the module, and doing
chroot.

If the login is acceptable, then the server will respond with

  @RSYNCD: OK

The client now writes some rsync options, as if it were remotely
executing the command.  The server parses these arguments as if it had
just been invoked with them, but they're added to the existing state.
So if the client specifies a list of files to be included or excluded,
they'll defer to existing limits specified in the server
configuration.

The server then talks to the client as normal across the socket,
passing checksums, file lists and so on.  For documentation of that,
stay tuned (or write it yourself!).