Alex Martelli provided a solution for using ConfigParser to parse similar files (which are section less files). His solution is a file-like wrapper that will automatically insert a dummy section.
You can apply the above solution to parsing rsyncd config files.
>>> class FakeGlobalSectionHead(object):
... def __init__(self, fp):
... self.fp = fp
... self.sechead = '[global]\n'
... def readline(self):
... if self.sechead:
... try: return self.sechead
... finally: self.sechead = None
... else: return self.fp.readline()
...
>>> cp = ConfigParser()
>>> cp.readfp(FakeGlobalSectionHead(open('rsyncd.conf')))
>>> print(cp.items('global'))
[('path', '/data/ftp'), ('pid file', '/var/run/rsyncdpid.pid'), ...]