rsync causing disk sleeps and loss of apps

[Anne Wilson]

I'm trying to get rsync to operate on a number of directories, but not in a 
mirror situation where I can easily use an existing app.  I therefore wanted 
to set up a shell script which can be run over the network using keychain to 
provide the necessary passwords.  On a single box it works perfectly, but of 
course the network makes it more complicated.

Part of the problem may be that I have followed too many how-tos, and set 
things up in a way that fight.  First, to get keychain correctly running -

Keychain is set up in .bash_profile and works.  Then I read that if you are 
going to run a script with cron you need to eval keychain within your script 
as it works in its own restricted environment.  This makes sense - but does 
that cause problems when I run tests in bash, since keychain is already 
running?

What happens at the moment is that the script appears to start, but suddenly 
stops.  System Monitor shows disk sleep for all the rsync threads, and several 
kde applications are also affected, notibly kwrite etc and dolphin etc..

To get out of the problem I have killed everything I can find related to those 
apps, but I still end up with having to restart the computer.  Logging out 
isn't enough - even if I can.  Sometimes it won't accept logout or even 
shutdown, and have to power off.  Probably that's when I've tried too long to 
cure it.

I desperately need some more experienced insight as to what is happening here.
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