Using HP-UX Internet Services (August 2003)

Distributing Files Using rdist
Troubleshooting rdist
Chapter 5 53
Troubleshooting rdist
The errors, warnings, and other messages encountered while using
rdist are displayed on the standard output of the master host. You can
use the notify command to mail a list of the updated files and errors
that may have occurred to the specified users on the remote host being
updated. To mail the list to a user that is not on the remote host, ensure
that you specify the mail recipient as user @ host .
If rdist does not update the files on the remote system, perform the
following checks:
• Use the -n command-line option to check the operation of a
distfile. This option prints the commands to the standard output
on the master host without executing them.
• Ensure that the remote system is reachable by using the ping
command.
• Ensure that the source files reside on the master host where rdist is
executed.
• Ensure that the source files do not have a negative modification
time. rdist aborts on files that have a negative modification time
(before January 1, 1970).
NOTE On NFS-mounted file systems, root may not have its usual access
privileges. If rdist is run by root, rdist may fail to copy to
NFS-mounted volumes.
An error message indicating a mismatch in the rdist version numbers
displays due to the following reasons:
• The BSD version of the rdist software running on the master host is
not the same as that running on the remote system. The HP-UX
rdist software is based on BSD’s version 3 of rdist and is
compatible with other implementations of BSD’s version 3 of rdist.
Ensure that the rdist software running on all systems is based on
BSD’s version 3.