Rsync and remote sudo

Running rsync with superuser privileges can be hard at times, but here's an easy solution works on Ubuntu 10.04 (some other solutions failed to work):

$  echo "password" | ssh sudo -S -v
$ sudo rsync -a -e ssh --rsync-path="sudo rsync"

The first line will touch the timestamp for sudo, the second line will really sync. Keep in mind that this doesn't take care of credentials for ssh, so you will need to take care of this using keys, agents or some external authentication mechanism like Kerberos.