My rdump is failing with a "Protocol botched" message. What do I do?

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) where these
variables are not set, and interactive sessions (eg. rlogin) where
they are.

You should use xntp version 3 to synchronize your time. Xntp
synchronizes to "atomic" and/or Radio Frequency clocks. Using
xntp time should always be within a few "milliseconds" of the
actual time. Xntp does not require a "atomic" clock, any
stable UNIX host clock will do.

You can get XNTP version 3 from

ftp://ftp.udel.edu/pub/ntp/

XNTP works with all versions of SunOS(4.x and 5.x).

Also, A web page for XNTP is available at

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp

Finally, Solaris 2.6 now cames with XNTP version 3.5Y.

documented on: 2000.05.10 Wed 09:37:40