[unison-users] Unison failure after upgrade

[Federico Marchetti [e-mail] [unison-users]]

Hello, thanks for having me in this mailing list. Unison has long been
my life-saving tool for keeping my computers in sync, without any
hassle. However, I have run into a number of major glitches now. Let me
explain the history.

I have a Debian file server, and since Unison 2.40 was the best it made
available in its repositories for version 8, I stuck with 2.40 on my
Ubuntu/Lubuntu 17.10 computers, resorting to the static file that was
made available. I used a symbolic link in my ~/bin (which is first in
the PATH) from "unison" to the lenghty name of the static file.
Everything worked fine, until I upgraded a laptop to 18.04, when
syncing failed with a mysterious error message:


unison: loadlocale.c:130: _nl_intern_locale_data: Assertion `cnt <
(sizeof (_nl_value_type_LC_TIME) / sizeof (_nl_value_type_LC_TIME[0]))'
failed.
Aborted (core dumped)

No matter. I upgraded my Debian serve to Debian 9, set it up with
Unison 2.84 and moved all my clients to 2.84. I don't have problems
with my desktop, except that calling just unison keeps trying to call
the no longer existent link in ~/bin (but that's a bash issue, so not a
Unison issue - calling /usr/bin/unison is all it takes). However, my
laptops fail to sync, all with the message

Fatal error: Lost connection with the server
0% (time spent on the connection, like 33:44. or similar)

I notice an FAQ on a similar error, but that was about VPN connection,
and the suggested solution was to set both MTU's (server and client) to
the same value. My connection is over a LAN, and both clients and
server report an MTU of 1500, so that doesn't seem to address the
problem.

I can manually rsync my main directories, as I used in the era BU
(Before Unison), but would really hope I can fix this issue quickly, as
I am to leave on a business trip, and having my directories synced is a
must.

Thank you for any advice!