rsync 2.5.5 (and previous versions) does not operate reliably for me when I use MIT's Kerberos5-1.2.4 rsh, but it does when I use ssh. Can anyone think of a reason? Here's the last error message I got trying it: unexpected tag 117 rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(298) Exit 12 Just a wild guess: could it be that the read and write system calls in rsync aren't handling EINTR properly? This is one of the few things I can think of that would differ between various transports.