I’m trying to sync my “useful software” directory on my desktop with my fileserver, and as there’s so much on there, doing it via NFS and drag’n’drop is a bit hit and miss, so I thought I’d try rsync’ing it.

When I tried using SSH as the transport I was getting strange “Corrupted MAC on input” errors, which nobody seems to know the cause of, its hinted at iffy hardware such as consumer-grade switches. Its nothing to do with MAC addresses, but actually SSH’s checksumming system. I thought it may be due to the VirtualBox bridging setup, so disabled br0 and went with plain old eth0, but that didn’t fix it.

I also tried enabling jumbo frames by issuing “ifconfig eth0 mtu 7200” to enable the RTL8169 chipset’s maximum frame size of 7K, which seems to work fine for NFS, but causes rsync to just sit there doing nothing at the “Receiving file list….” bit.

So I setup a basic rsync server on my desktop machine by creating an /etc/rsyncd.conf file and running rsync –daemon; this stops rsync using a remote shell (such as SSH/RSH) and forces it to use the rsync protocol instead.

Now everything seems to work fine – no SSH MAC issues, and its running up to twice as fast as SSH at about 40MB/s, jumbo frames still don’t work though and I still get a “failed verification” every now and then, although I guess that’s normal enough as I used to find that a lot when mirroring the Fedora Updates repository over the internet – at least it retries rather than giving up as SSH does. I also seem to get a few “permission denied” messages when it tries to transfer PDF files, which seems very odd.

Update: VirtualBox 2.0.2 is out, with many bugfixes, although to me it seems less stable than 2.0.0 as my Vista VM got hosed when I installed teh gest additions, although to be fair I did try to install ServicePack1 at the same time.

VMWare Server 1.0.7 is out too – just some security fixes though.

I watched Finding Amanda, which was a totally awful movie about a gambler who tries to get his hooker niece into rehab, although its him that needs the rehab.