Does anyone know if rsync will work without ssh or rsh? I am trying to use rsync to synchronize files on two servers, one a production server and the other a standbyserver. The problem is that I have't been given the ok to install openssh on our productions servers, so I am trying to make my job easier by just using rsync.

I have performed rsync transfers on two test machines by streaming rsync through ssh; however, when I try running rsync without streaming through ssh, I get the following errors:

Permission denied.
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes read so far)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(165)

Based on my testing, rsync appears to be dependent upon ssh or rsh. Also, I found no option to compile rsync without ssh or rsh after reading "configure --help".

I've used rsync to backup my partitions to other partitions.
Would you be able to mount the backup servers directory via NFS onto the production server, and rsync the files this way?

I'm not sure I understand. Why not use rsh? That way you can satisfy the requirement of not installing OpenSSH on the server.

Also see from the rsync man page:

You may also want to increase the verbosity. Maybe you didnt set up rsh correctly?

The company I am with now has used nfs in the past, and it created a lot of problems for them. To make matters, we are still using SCO; although, we have
ported our applications to Linux successfully in a test environment.

The reason my company is so reluctant about installing ssh is because we use
acconex and secure connex, which uses ssh, too. In the past, a former admin unkowningly installed ssh, which overwrote the acconex and secure connex version. This caused connection problems and has made them paranoid about anyone installing anything new.

Currently, we are using shell scripting to do everything. In fact, we have so many shell scripts that I stay confused. I want to use rsync to eliminate some of the scripts we currently have running in cron.