Improve spark-ec2 script to handle users that are not root

Hi,

I was trying to use the spark-ec2 script from Spark to create a new Spark cluster wit an user different than root (--user=ec2-user). Unfortunately the part of the script that attempts to copy the templates into the target machines fail because it tries to rsync /etc/* and /root/*

This is the full traceback

rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/root/spark-ec2" failed: Permission denied (13)

• • • Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***

sent 95 bytes received 17 bytes 224.00 bytes/sec
total size is 1444 speedup is 12.89
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 2 3) at main.c(1039) [sender=3.0.6]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/ec2-user/spark-1.4.0/ec2/spark_ec2.py", line 1455, in <module>
main()
File "/home/ec2-user/spark-1.4.0/ec2/spark_ec2.py", line 1447, in main
real_main()
File "/home/ec2-user/spark-1.4.0/ec2/spark_ec2.py", line 1283, in real_main
setup_cluster(conn, master_nodes, slave_nodes, opts, True)
File "/home/ec2-user/spark-1.4.0/ec2/spark_ec2.py", line 785, in setup_cluster
modules=modules
File "/home/ec2-user/spark-1.4.0/ec2/spark_ec2.py", line 1049, in deploy_files
subprocess.check_call(command)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 540, in check_call
raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['rsync', '-rv', '-e', 'ssh -o StrictHos tKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -i /home/ec2-user/.ssh/sparkclus terkey_us_east.pem', '/tmp/tmpT4Iw54/', u'ec2-user@ec2-52-2-96-193.compute-1.ama zonaws.com:/']' returned non-zero exit status 23

Is there a workaround for this? I want to improve security of our operations by avoiding user root on the instances.