My rdump is failing with a “Protocol botched” message. What do I do?
The problem produces output like the following: DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Wed Jan 6 08:50:01 1993 DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch DUMP: Dumping /dev/rsd0a (/) to /dev/nrst8 on host foo DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files] DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories] DUMP: estimated 8232 blocks (4.02MB) on 0.00 tape(s). DUMP: Protocol to remote tape server botched (in rmtgets). rdump: Lost connection to remote host. DUMP: Bad return code from dump: 1 This occurs when something in .cshrc on the remote machine prints something to stdout or stderr (eg. stty, echo). The rdump command doesn’t expect this, and chokes. Other commands which use the rsh protocol (eg. rdist, rtar) may also be affected. The way to get around this is to add the following line near the beginning of .cshrc, before any command that might send something to stdout or stderr: if ( ! $?prompt ) exit This causes .cshrc to exit when prompt isn’t set, which distinguishes between remote commands (eg. rdump, rsh)