In followup to my previous post. I have narrowed it down to an SSH client issue, so I have been able to workaround it w/ the following: 1. Install the Solaris9 OpenSSH package from sunfreeware 2. Install the Solaris9 OpenSSL package from sunfreeware (required by openSSH) 3. invoke rsync w/ rsync -avz --progress -e /usr/local/bin/ssh server:/path/to/file . The SSH daemon can still be running Sun_SSH on the server-side...As long as I use OpenSSH from rsync (client-side) , everything is working. Alex