I am trying to backup my machine onto another machine using tar and netcat with no success.
On the receiving machine, I issue a On the sending machine, I boot with a RIP CD, mount the partition I want to backup as read-only, cd to the mountpoint and issue The processing starts for some time but then appears to hang, without any message.
I then have 0% CPU on both machines but both respond perfectly in other virtual terminals. The filesystem on the receiving end still has space left. Removing compression doesn't change anything.
The last 2 times I checked, the last name to be printed by tar was always the same. The filename of the last processed file has no strange characters.
Has anybody had similar issues?

EDIT: the problem seems to be that tar does not send an EOF to netcat so netcat just seems to continue listening.

You can use ssh over tar; via you are using netcat?

tar over ssh uses a lot of CPU and as I am on a completely isolated LAN, there's no need for ssh. OTOH I tried to use NFS instead of netcat, and that worked fine, but it takes a little bit more work to set up.

In the meantime I found the answer myself (after taking nearly one day to figure out that it was an EOF problem): just add "-q 0" to both nc commands, and netcat will quit immediately at the first EOF.