rsync - Nov 2003 - rsync / cygwin hanging problem

Has any progress ever been made towards fixing the problem causing rsync
processes to hang in the cygwin environment?  I've tried just using Unison
in the windows environment, since it has a native port, but, um.  Unison is
probably great for what it IS intended for, but it absolutely sucks nuts as a
backup solution (has a tendency to choke and cancel the ENTIRE PROCESS without
synching anything at all if it encounters a file it doesn't like, and there
are LOTS of file types it doesn't like).

So anyway, I know the "rsync sometimes hangs under cygwin" problem has
been acknowledged, but does anybody know anything about when it might be
identified and resolved?

Thanks.

-J

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 04:28:38PM -0500, Jim Salter
wrote:
> Has any progress ever been made towards fixing the problem
> causing rsync processes to hang in the cygwin environment?
> I've tried just using Unison in the windows environment,
> since it has a native port, but, um.  Unison is probably
> great for what it IS intended for, but it absolutely sucks
> nuts as a backup solution (has a tendency to choke and
> cancel the ENTIRE PROCESS without synching anything at all
> if it encounters a file it doesn't like, and there are
> LOTS of file types it doesn't like).
I'm guessing you are hitting the file locking issue but that
is just a guess.
> So anyway, I know the "rsync sometimes hangs under cygwin"
> problem has been acknowledged, but does anybody know
> anything about when it might be identified and resolved?
As far as i can tell none of the people who know the rsync
code use Windows with the possible exception of Craig.  He
has a patch that may reduce the frequency of hangs but his
recommendation (if i recall correctly) is to not use rsync
over ssh on windows.  Rsync apparently works OK as a daemon
on whendoze and when accessing an rsync daemon.

My gut impression is that there is a problem with pipe
delivery in the cygwin environment that is probably a
manifestation of a whenblows IPC problem or differing
semantics.  If that is correct this problem may be
intractable.

When will this problem be resolved?  That may prove to be a
question of perspective.  Some might say it already is.  It
would be nice if rsync were reliable on that other, legacy
OS (Windos) so if someone can come up with a patch that
actually fixes the problem without making the code even
uglier and without breaking any other platforms i'd be glad
to commit it.  But until then any "fixes" will remain as
external patches and rsync on Windows will be just like many
other things on Windows: it requires hand-holding and often
fails.

-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw@pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt

> recommendation (if i recall correctly) is to not use rsync
> over ssh on windows.  Rsync apparently works OK as a daemon
> on whendoze and when accessing an rsync daemon.
It does not make me happy to read this. Anyway, I like to describe my 
experience of the last two days, maybe this helps someone, or someone 
can help me:
I wanted to synch an Win2000 machine and a WinXP machine. For some 
(offtopic) reason I can use Win2k only as local system, since I can?t 
even ping it although there is no firewall and hidden server mode is not 
activated (as far as I know. Hints on that are welcome too).
rsync -...e ssh user@... /cygdrive/... works well with small folders, 
but with larger ones, it hangs and copies not more than one (!) file.
Additionally I have a Linux machine in the network. My final solution 
was to synch first to that system and from that to the Win2k system.
Summarized it behaves like this:
local	(data direction) remote
Win2k		<--	 WinXP	hangs at folders with ca. >300 files after copying 1 
files at max.
linux 		<-- 	 WinXP	hangs
WinXP		-->	 linux	copies about 2GB, then freezes the whole WinXP (not 
only cygwin, ctrl+c not working)
Win2k		<--	 linux	works fine, but with incredibly high processor load on 
Win2k (like 900MHz for maybe 3MBit/s)



Uli M.

P.s.: All versions of last weeks cygwin webpage and Suse8.2.