The /3.4/os/s390x/ directory includes a lot of subdirectories that do not have write permission for the owner. For example:

# rsync msync.centos.org::CentOS/3.4/os/s390x/ [...snip...] dr-xr-xr-x 4096 2005/05/15 21:01:50 RedHat [...snip...]

Of course that rsync fails creating some symlinks in that directory if it runs as an unpriviledged user.

Running rsync as root is not an acceptable workaround.

Mihai