2.5.7 vs 2.6.1 interoperability bug

[Dan Pritts]

Hi all -

I've got two red hat linux 7.3 systems.  

On each i have the redhat-provided 2.5.7 in the standard location,
and a locally built copy of 2.6.1 in /usr/local/pkg.

I'm implementing a remote-backup-to-disk setup.

blakey is the "client" (source of rsync), verve is the "server" (dest
of rsync).

When i take care to match rsync binary versions (2.5.7 on each side,
or 2.6.1 on each side) things seem to work fine.

However, when i run 2.5.7 on the client and 2.6.1 on the server,
i get bad corruption.

   [root at blakey bin]# which rsync
   /usr/bin/rsync

   [root at blakey bin]# rsync --version
   rsync  version 2.5.7  protocol version 26

line split for readability...

   [root at blakey bin]# rsync -aRx -e ssh 
     --rsync-path=/usr/local/pkg/rsync-2.6.1/bin/rsync 
     --exclude-from=/tmp/excludes --numeric-ids --delete --delete-after  
     / root at verve:/home/blakey-ext3/plain9

   [root at blakey bin]# ls -l /bin/vi
   -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       434856 Jan 15  2003 /bin/vi

   [root at verve bin]# ls -l /home/blakey-ext3/plain9/bin/vi
   -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 Jan 15  2003 /home/blakey-ext3/plain9/bin/vi

I first noticed this when I had built 2.6.1 statically linked, but the
problem occurs with a dynamically-linked version as well.

The --link-dest option "doesn't work" across these versions either - when
i specify it i don't get hardlinks for common files.  Maybe it is
checking the proper contents vs. the wrong file on the --link-dest area,
which fails, and then the corruption happens later.

Some of the files I am able to identify as mis-named.  For instance,
"/bin/sed" on the target contains the contents of "/bin/vi" from the
source.  On the other hand I'm not able to figure out where the contents
of /bin/vi come from - and the 4096 size is quite suspicious.

I'm happy to provide other debugging if that helps.

thanks

danno
--
dan pritts                                       danno at internet2.edu
systems administrator                            734/352-4953 office
internet2                                        734/834-7224 mobile