So I figured out a workaround to a problem that has been annoying me for quite some time. Scouring forums turned up very little.

Somehow, whenever I try to SCP or RSYNC a large file from my laptop (OSX 10.4 iBook G4) to my server (Debian stable on AMD) I got the message:

Received disconnect from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd: 2: Corrupted MAC on input.

Well, it seems to happen because of a bug in OpenSSL in the version that I have installed on my laptop and there’s no easy fix. I could either track down the problem and waste my life recompiling it, or I can work around it in a hackish manner.

So, instead of actually figuring out what the problem is/was (and it happens when I change MACs and do all sorts of other stuff) I’m simply avoiding the problem altogether. On one computer I typed:

netcat -l -p 12345 | tar xvz

and on the other I typed

tar cvz * | nc soy.dyndns.org 12345

Because somehow that was simpler than solving the actual problem. I’d also like to complain that MAC stands for too many things in the computer world – Media Access Controller, Message Authentication Code, Macintosh, etc. Get some new TLAs guys!