Reliability and robustness problems

[John]

I got the axe out and sharpened it, and leaned it against the garden 
shed, and the plant is growning.

Canberrans here may recall the advice of David Young who had a gardening 
talkback program on ABC radio in the early 80s.

>2.6.2 has fixes for unnecessary transfers.
>  
>

I added "--timeout=3600," and set it running.

I then did a little work. First, I built 2.6.2 from Sid for Woody.
Second, I located Fedora 2 where I discovered the source rpm for rsync 
2.6.2, It built as wasily as one could wish on RHL 7.3.

The backup has been chugging away for over 24 hours now. When it 
faulters, I have 2.6.2 ready to install in both locations.

Seriously, I think the significant difference has been running it on the 
VPN. I'm running OpenVPN because, when I was researching my problems 
with VTUND I discovered it doesn't cope with with firewalls: the 
recommendation is to use TCP instead of UDP, and my reading at the CIPE 
home page suggests that's not a good idea. I figured I might as well use 
PPP over SSH. However, someone reported on the VTUND that he'd got 
OpenVPN going with a minimum of bother, and that's my experience now too.

OpenVPN tunnels using UDP, and can survive outages that cause rsync/ssh 
to hang. It also does adaptive compression - it turns compression on/off 
from time to time based on current traffic.

It can also do bandwidth limiting.

I will install 2.6.2 when the backup run has completed, but I want the 
current run to complete first.

Thanks for your help. I'll review  the email with the object of filing 
some bug reports for anything I think outstanding so you folk can deal 
appropriately with them.