rsync 2.4.6 hanging on HPUX11 only over firewall.

[rsyncuser]

We are running rsync 2.4.6 on HPUX-11and using it to push a document-root from a staging area to several servers running rsync in daemon mode.
 
The rsync client syncs successfully to modules on the same server and to most other machines, but hangs when trying to syncronise across a firewall (from  SECURE zone to DMZ) 

(The firewall port IS OPEN!!)

During a normal release where there are rougly less than 200 changed files the syncronisation across the firewall runs fine. 

However it hangs when we try and sync the entire document-root ( or a large subset of it). It appears to wait for several minutes with no new messages in the logs and no packets being exchanged. Eventually it may carry and then hang on another file.

After spending 2 days trying to compile 2.5.5 and then finding it didn't work  at all ( my memory tells me that it was an error at line 150 of io.c ) we are not keen on moving up to 2.5.5 just yet!

I've looked through the mailing list archives and found Wayne Davison's rsync-nohang.patch was suggested to fix similar problems, but this seems to be available for the 2.5.X releases.

We are interested in finding out whether the wayne-nohang patches can be applied to 2.4.6. 

How widely has this patch been implemented, and has anyone found any problems with it? Do people think it is likely to solve our problems? What is the basic idea behind how it solves the problem?

Also has anyone found any problems with rsyncing through firewalls where they haven't had the problem for the same files where there is no firewall?

Unfortunately as the problems we have are only exhibiting themselves on our production servers we very limited by what diagnostics we are allowed to run and we havent managed to get the same symptoms to exhibit themselves on our (supposedly identical) test machines.

I know theres a lot of questions here, but I have spent a good deal of time trying to work out the issue and have hit a bit of  a brick wall, so any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards


Mark Hyde


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