Almost always I can find answers to my issues in this forum but when I wasn't able to today I took matters into my own hands...

Checked some logs this a.m. and found the following error:

ssh: connect to host thyme01 port 22: Connection timed out
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(454) [receiver=2.6.9]

Checked my firewall and all seemed well. Checked my sshd daemon and that was fine. Did some additional troubleshooting and found that one of my bad practices caused this. Turns out that one of my workstations I remotely back-up with rsync got rebooted and got a new IP address via DHCP. Because I do some port mapping on my router ("packets arriving at the router for port 'xyz' are forwarded to port 'xyz' at IP address '192.168.x.x'"), the packets weren't making it to the new IP address, thus the timed out error in the backup log file. Once I updated the port map on my router to the newly issued IP address, I could rsync/ssh again.

I'll be setting up a static IP for my workstation shortly to avoid this in the future.

Or an alternate method would be to set up dhcp and dns for automatic updates.

For a simple network setup, that might be overkill. Your solution sounds like
a good one.