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The "-P" option would tell the tool to print the statistics every 2 seconds. The tool may ask you for a password on the "local" machine because it will be making SSH login and launching the bbcp executable on the server side. By defdault BBCP will use 4 simultaneous streams to send data over the network. You can increase that number by using the "-s" opting and specified the desired number of streams. In the next example, this is also combined with

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Troubleshooting

No bbcp executable available at a remote site

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Sometimes a firewall (either at SLAC or at a remote site) may block certain (ranges of) ports. Unfortunatelly, it's hard to diagnose this problem directly. BBCP would report this typically as follows:

% bbcp -P 2 user@SomeRemoteHost:/dev/zero /dev/null
bbcp: Accept timed out on port 5031
bbcp: Unable to allocate more than 0 of 4 data streams.
Killed by signal 15.

Note, that the actual port number may vary in each specific case because bbcp would attempt to dynamically allocate the next available (at the remote server machine) port. A workaround for this problem is to use option "-z" which would use reverse connection protocol (i.e., sink to source):

% bbcp -z -P 2 user@SomeRemoteHost:/dev/zero /dev/null
user@SomeRemoteHost's password:
bbcp: Creating /dev/null/zero
bbcp: At 090414 02:59:48 copy 0% complete; 5461.3 KB/s
bbcp: At 090414 02:59:50 copy 0% complete; 13639.7 KB/s
..

4 Tuneup

Usefull links

• http://pcbunn.cithep.caltech.edu/bbcp/using_bbcp.htm - the link provides usefull tips on tuning up TCP parameters on machines involved into the data transfer.