Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 10 333

Using rdist

Troubleshooting rdist

Errors, warnings, and other messages are sent to standard output on the

master host. Use the notify command to mail a list of ﬁles updated 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,

make sure that you specify the mail recipient as user@host.

If rdist does not update ﬁles on the remote system, check the following:

• Use the -n command line option to check the operation of a distﬁle.

This option prints out the commands to standard output on the

master host without executing them.

• Make sure that the remote system is reachable by using the ping

command.

• Source ﬁles must reside on the master host where rdist is executed.

Make sure that the ﬁles exist on the master host.

• rdist aborts on ﬁles that have a negative modiﬁcation time (before

January 1, 1970). Make sure that the source ﬁles do not have a

negative modiﬁcation time.

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.

A message that there is a mismatch of rdist version numbers may be

caused by one of the following:

• 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 .

Make sure the rdist software running on all systems is based on

BSD’s version 3.

• An executable version of rdist is not in /usr/bin on the remote

system.

NOTE The -M command line option may not be supported by non-HP rdist

implementations.