I have a setup that involves syncing files from my laptop to a server regularly. This has been working pretty well for a long time, apart from the odd verification failures. Both machines are WiFi-connected, so when I attempt to sync from a room far away from the WAP, the failure rates for larger files are higher, I would guess due to packet losses.

Today, I am sitting at the same spot I usually do this successfully with no issues, and I get errors after errors after errors. The odd one will go through after multiple tries, but generally it is just not working properly. I also got a broken pipe today during one attempt. This is not the first time it happens, and I feel crazy for thinking it is correlated to do bad weather, as if that should somehow affect my indoor WiFi quality…

Anyways, I tried to look at the rsync versions on the sender and receiver, and noticed that while both are the same application version number (3.2.7), they operate on different protocol versions (sender: 31, receiver: 32). I found this a bit odd, and I was unable to figure out how I would force my laptop to also use protocol version 32. I know I can pass a --protocol=NUM argument, but that seems to be used to force the sender to use an older version in case the receiver only has an older version, which is the opposite of my current situation.

And what is the likelihood that this is the cause of my woes?