[CentOS] Rsync/SSH automation problem?

Fri May 1 16:08:41 UTC 2009
Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com>

Kai Schaetzl wrote:
>> The second thing you will notice, eventually, is that rsync over ssh 
>> under Cygwin is unreliable.
> 
> You mean *starting* an rsync operation on that side? Using rsync over ssh 
> essentially uses rsync on *both* ends. So, it's running under Cygwin, anyway, 
> which makes your statement a bit confusing.

What I mean is that if you launch rsync with something like:

rsync -e ssh server:/path /path

then rsync uses a non-blocking (I said blocking earlier, which was a 
mistake) socket pair to communicate with ssh.  This may trigger a bug in 
cygwin which can cause the application to hang.

If, instead, you run rsync as a daemon on Windows, you can reliably 
communicate with the daemon over TCP.  This remains true if you use ssh 
to forward a port.  Thus, I recommend that anyone running rsync on 
Windows set up rsync as a daemon that listens for connections on 
localhost only and use ssh port forwards to reach it from remote systems.