OT: system migrations or backups and rsync

[Fairlight]

Just so nobody else scratches their head over this inordinately, I would
advise that anyone using rsync to do system migrations and/or backups who
notices things taking an inordinate amount of time (and not finishing)
should really look at their versions of rsync.

Currently, I'm doing a migration between SuSE 9.0 Professional to SLES10,
and the version of rsync on the 9.0 box was inadequate and froze in the
middle of tbe "Building file list..." process.  Further checks in more
verbose modes after ruling out other factors showed that rsync itself was
hanging for no apparent reason.  Got and built a new version of rsync that
matched the SLES10 version (actually it supercedes it a bit, although SuSE
may have made equivalent patches in theirs), and it started working as it
should.

I'm dealing with 38GB of data (much of it fP and fP-derived, hence the
relevance) in this one run, so it was a bit of an educated guess as to
whether it was just taking an appropriately long time or getting stuck.  It
-was- getting stuck, and I can confirm that.

I've had issues with rsync versions not being compatible enough and doing
odd things before.  This time was really annoying, however.  Figured I'd
save others the aggravation if I could.

mark->