For anybody trying to build a static binary: Glibc static binaries are not backwards compatible: to get really static binaries you'd have to compile them with musl libc. The easiest way for me was to set up a VM with alpine linux. Then I configured and build rsync and at the end ran these commands to get a static binary: cp /usr/lib/libacl.a . gcc -static -O2 -Wall -static-libgcc -W -o rsync $(find . -name '*.o') libacl.a strip rsync And the resulting binary works fine on an ancient (2008) machine. # Han