I'm getting ready to transfer /home from an older slackware linux machine to a newer ubuntu linux machine. both are running 2.6.6 (I upgraded the older one to match the newer one). When I include the og options the directories and files have the same UID and GID as on the source machine. If I'm reading the man pages correctly what should happen is if a file is owned by user tom group users on the old machine the same user and group should own the file on the new machine even if the new machine uses different UID's and GID's. If the ownership is transferred by UID/GID and not user name/group name then I'd like to make a suggestion that an option be added so that data can be transferred by actual user names and group names, not by UID/GID.
The -o and -g option fall-back to --numeric-ids if name conversion is not possible. Is an rsync daemon involved in the transfer? If so, see the comments about numeric-ids in the "use chroot" section of the rsyncd.conf manpage. If not, run rsync under strace to see why the password/group lookups are failing.
My apologies for taking your time. it was the use chroot option. I was misreading what it did from the man pages and assuming the default was what I wanted. Thanks you for the help, you can close this bug as solved.