rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (Broken pipe)

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 06:35:50AM -0700, jw schultz wrote:
> 
> You could try turning on transfer logging i suppose.  If you
> haven't already done so you might want to use the "log file"
> option in case chroot is getting in the way.  Beyond this i
> have no suggestions; i dont use rsyncd.

I may be having a similar problem.  I'm using rsync version 2.5.6cvs-20030205
every night on Solaris 8/x86 to do a backup from a client system to a 
backup server using rsyncd.  Almost every night I see the following errors
logged on the rsyncd server:

Jun 18 00:48:18 ead62 rsyncd[9632]: [ID 702911 daemon.warning] inflate returned -3 (0 bytes)
Jun 18 00:48:18 ead62 rsyncd[9632]: [ID 702911 daemon.warning] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at ../token.c(416)
Jun 18 00:48:18 ead62 rsyncd[9632]: [ID 702911 daemon.warning] rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (197041 bytes read so far)
Jun 18 00:48:18 ead62 rsyncd[9632]: [ID 702911 daemon.warning] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at ../io.c(187)

And on the client side, I see the following error:

rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 42 bytes: phase "unknown": Broken pipe
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at ../io.c(622)

This has been happening to me for months almost every night.  I find
that I can check the return code from rsync to see whether the
transfer succeeded.  If it failed, I simply try again, and it almost
always finishes the backup successfully on the second invocation.  But if
not I keep retrying up to 10 times.  I think one evening it took 9 attempts,
but most of the time it works in 2 tries.  It's a hack, but it gets
the job done, and I was having no luck debugging the problem.

-Andy