On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 01:59:12PM +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Sorin Srbu wrote: > > >> >> The worst thing about BackupPC is the insane error message > >> >> "Unable to read 4 bytes", which comes up if anything is wrong. > >> >> Possibly the worst error message anywhere? > >> > > >> > thats an rsync protocol message, and yeah, debugging > >> > connection/authentication issues is a bit ugly. > >> > >> I'm sure you are right. > >> But I use rsync several times a day, and I have never received this > >> message. > >> > >> It's not ugly, it is inexcusable. It may not be rsync fault. I vaguely recall that BackupPC uses an ancient (~2006) Perl rsync library, which, for instance, does not support compressed transfers. Maybe that terse message is all that BackupPC gets from the library. :-) Mihai