What Is RSYNC and why is it giving me grief?

rsync & account suspended on shared account

[akogo]

I discovered that my web hosting account was suspended. My web host tech support showed me this:

1 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 76.3 0.6 10:37 1 rsync
8283 allkinds 20 19 27560 26M 564 D N 65.6 0.6 12:03 0 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 99.9 0.6 12:25 2 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 99.9 0.6 12:25 2 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 99.9 0.6 14:06 3 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 51.6 0.6 14:22 2 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 82.8 0.6 14:29 0 rsync
8283 allkinds 19 19 27560 26M 564 D N 40.5 0.6 15:13 1 rsync

I asked them what it meant, so they gave this reply:

It means that your site was consistantly taking up the majority of the CPU bandwidth consistienly, over 40% for a monitored period of over 30 minuties, causing lods on the server to exceed stable operating levels.

Our ToS specifies that at no time can any client consistantly use more then 20% of the CPU bandwidth on the shared server enviroments.

you would have to promice to permenantly disable the offending process for us to unsuspend your account.

I'm still not sure 100% what rsync does or is but they eventually said that was the process that cause them to suspend my account.

I never used rsync -- not to my knowledge. Is it possible someone else is copying my site? If so, how do I find out who it is? I tried asking tech support several times, but they seem to think I'm doing it.

Is it me or is the web host doing it?

[encyclo]

rsync is an incremental file transfer program - a bit like FTP, but one which only transfers changed bits, and it can be used to synchronize data accross two machines.

rsync reference [samba.anu.edu.au]

There is no reason why the web host would be doing it, but if you don't know why your account is running that process, you need to investigate thoroughly.

First question that comes to mind is what kind of scripts are you running? Are you using a dynamically-generated site which is getting data from other servers?

If you are only running a static site, then it is a cause for concern - it may be that your account has been hijacked in some way.

[akogo]

First question that comes to mind is what kind of scripts are you running? Are you using a dynamically-generated site which is getting data from other servers?

I'm using DWodp live (http://www.dominion-web.com). Also Amazon Web Services.

You think that is the problem? It never was a problem before as far as I know.

What exactly does the data say?

[encyclo]

It'll probably be DWodp live - every time a user hits a page, the script grabs the page out from a DMOZ server. That script is quite clever, but it's a huge resource hog.

If you want to run a DMOZ clone, you'll need to grab the data and host it yourself.

[akogo]

encyclo,

Thanks for the insight. I've tried to contact them to see if they somehow use rsync.