[CentOS] rsync over ssh stalls after completing the job

Tue Apr 13 16:45:47 UTC 2021
Frank Cox <theatre at sasktel.net>

Here's a weird one.

I have two Centos 8 machines that use rsync-over-ssh to back up files between each other.  (Each machine acts as a backup machine for the other one.)

There's are nightly cronjobs that do the backing up, the commands look like this:

rsync -av --delete /home/mydirectory jeff:/home/mydirectorybackup

That command works fine when it's run through the cronjob.

When I try to run a rsync command between mutt and jeff from the commandline, that's where the problem starts.  It worked a few days ago but now when I log into jeff and do a rsync to or from mutt it works fine.  When I log into mutt and do a rsync to or from jeff it works and does the job, but then it seems to stall afterward and I have to hit ctrl-c to get my cursor back.

Here's a test run so you can see what happens.  

[me at mutt temp]$ rsync -avv ../temp/ jeff:temp
opening connection using: ssh jeff rsync --server -vvlogDtpre.iLsfxC . temp  (7 args)
sending incremental file list
delta-transmission enabled
bookmarks.html is uptodate
./
abc
total: matches=0  hash_hits=0  false_alarms=0 data=26321
^Crsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at rsync.c(644) [sender=3.1.3]

A file named bookmarks.html existed in both directories so it wasn't changed, and a new file abc was copied to the backup directory.  Then my ctrl-c stopped the job and brought the cursor back after it stalled.

scp works fine to copy files either way when logged into either machine and, again, my backup-this-to-that cronjobs that run rsync seem to be working fine as well.  I just discovered this last night when I went to rsync some files manually between these machines. The last time I did that was at least a few days ago and it worked fine then.

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