rdist hangs

[Tom Iarusso]

I have a nightly Oracle backup process that includes rdist as its last command to keep a complete db backup on a local host. Periodically, the rdist does not complete, it just hangs and I have to kill it. What can cause rdist to hang, and is there any way to force it to timeout. The O/S is Compaq Tru64 UNIX V5.1B (Rev. 2650)

[Abdul Rahiman]

Please turn on some debugging with your rdist command to capture the causes for hanging.

From the man pages of rdist,
-D Turns on debugging output.
-n Prints the commands without executing them. This option is useful for debugging distfile.

Reasons could be from network problems to problems with distfile etc..

[Ralf Puchner]

rdist is an opensource implementation, please post your question/problems to the specific forum of the vendor.

Root cause is not platform dependent and mostly a network or permission problem.

A good starter:
http://mailservices-oldsysadmin.web.cern.ch/mailservices-oldsysadmin/sysadmin/Operations/rdist.html

also use "trace" or "truss" or kernel debugger to analyze where the process will hang.

A timeout mechanism depend on the used version, but there a lot of version having implemented such a feature. If not sure start a second script killing the other one after a while (easiest method).