unexpected tag 90

[Craig Barratt]

> can anybody help?  what does tag 90 mean?

It looks like the sender and receiver are getting out of sync while
the file list is being sent.  The data sent in blocks.  Each block
starts with an 8 bit tag and a 24 bit length. The valid values of
the tag are 7,8,9,10.  Any other value (eg: 90) produces an error.
See read_unbuffered() in io.c.  Your strace shows:

    read(5, "sysa", 4)

This should be the tag and length, which is clearly wrong.  The 90
is 'a' - 7.

Beyond this, I don't know why this is happening.  One completely random
thought: what is the LANG setting in /etc/sysconfig/i18n on the client
machines?  If it is UTF-8 I would suggest trying it with "en_US":

    LANG="en_US"

Other than that, I would suggest running gdb or adding debug statements
to see where it gets out of sync.

Craig