I am running rsync version 2.6.8 on a RedHat box.

I'm having trouble getting rsync to connect to the remote server. I piped in a grep of "password" on rsync's man page, and I see "you will receive a password prompt when you connect ..."

I ran where user@host was the username, and the trailing rsync/ is my dest folder. I did not get a password prompt, and rsync failed to connect, because the connection was refused.

Any ideas?
- David

Check the firewall/iptables to see if you need to open port 873

Regards,

Fordeck

I emailed the support staff at the datacenter and asked them to open up the port for a specific IP address. They responded with the following:

I realized after making my initial post here that I did not do a good job in explaining my working environment. The (remote) webserver is running RedHat and rsync version 2.6.8 - which really doesn't matter. The computer that I am actually using to connect to the remote server is a Windows computer running cygwin. On Cygwin, I am running rsync version 3.0.4.

After receiving our datacenter's response, I tried issuing the following command (again) through Cygwin:
I got a "connection refused" message again.

Any other ideas? Is there a way that I can verify that port 873 has been opened up? I'm not very familiar with CSF or with iptables. I do, however, have root ssh access to the server.

Your syntax to me looks wrong but it might just be the way I use rsync. My scripts look something like this:
rsync -avz user@host:/source /destination
Note: I haven't used rsync on Windows, just Linux.

Check that you are running rsync as a daemon on the redhat server and if so, do netstat -pantu|grep 873 to make sure that it is indeed listening. Then from the windows host, use nmap against the server IP to scan for the open port 873.

If you are not running rsync that way on the server, then your syntax should look like Myiagros's, where the transport is SSH.

Thanks guys. I already knew that I wasn't running rsync as a daemon on the server, so the syntax that Myiagros suggested worked. However, I am facing a new dilemma. I want to stick this rsync into a cron.

Here's what I currently have (which works):
I want to change it so that I can include user@host's password. Would the best solution be something like the following into my shell script?
Or will I need to do something a little different?

That or the --password-file option, or my personal preference: setup an ssh pub/priv key pair.

I have been told that by exporting the RSYNC_PASSWORD, this would create a security hole, and that instead I should use SSH Key Authentication. I am in the midst of researching how I go about this, and will post the steps shortly. I'm almost to the point of being ready to go to work on it.

That's good, cuz this is a perfectly good research topic and i'd hate to deprive anyone of the satisfaction of finding the answer themselves . still, if you run into a block, you know where to go.