A couple of quick questions, were you able to resolve your problem? Are your sites on separate servers? If they are on the same server are they using the same account?
I was having trouble with the plugin on multiple fronts, one is the commands executed for the database operations left out the DB host name and as such were all being executed against localhost (I fixed these myself as I’m on a tight deadline), the other was the issues with rsync.
With rsync, if the live account is on another server it may be tricky to get this to work without modifying the code. You can specify the account name and host in the Live Install Path (account@host:/path to wp) but I haven’t tested creating a password file and using the command line option –password-file.
If they are two separate accounts on the same server, you can add the staging user to the unix group that the live user is in and then set the group write permission on the wp folder to allow the staging user to write into the live users wp directory. This was how I got around the error. Though I first attempted setting account@host in the Install Path, but my server hosting all of my WP sites are in Amazon EC2 and after playing with certs for auto login for awhile I decided to go another route.
