bug report: errors in file transfer

Michael Lachmann dirk at santafe.edu
Wed May 22 04:07:02 EST 2002


Hi!
I just encountered a serious problem with rsync.

I used rsync to copy a big directory between two computers. The source
machine was a sun, the destination was a linux box. The destination
directory did not exist before the copy started.

I used the following command to copy the directory over:

rsync -aSz source_machine:projects/ projects2

because I was somewhat paranoid, I checked if all files were transferred
correctly using the following command:
find . -not -type d -exec cksum \{\} \; |sort +2 >/tmp/w

which was issued on both the source and the destination machines. Then I
used 'diff -b ' to compare these two files. It turned out that some of the
files transferred had a different checksum. When I manually checked if the
files indeed differed, I found that they were not transferred correctly!

This means that rsync did not transfer all the files correctly. The file
sizes were correct, but their contents differed.

I then tried to overcome the problem using

rsync -caSz ....

instead. This gave only one file that had mistakes. Then I tried

rsync -az ...

which still had errors.

With my current setup, this problem is repeatable. The files that have
errors are usually big files.

Now, a bit about the setup:
source is a sun, with the partition mounted over NFS from a disk-server.

destination is a linux box, with a partition of type ext3 on LVM,
 debian sid.

source rsync version is:
---
rsync  version 2.5.2  protocol version 26
Copyright (C) 1996-2002 by Andrew Tridgell and others
<http://rsync.samba.org/>
Capabilities: 64-bit files, socketpairs, hard links, symlinks, batchfiles,
no IPv6,
              64-bit system inums, 64-bit internal inums
--

destination rsync:
--
rsync  version 2.5.4  protocol version 26
Copyright (C) 1996-2002 by Andrew Tridgell and others
<http://rsync.samba.org/>
Capabilities: 64-bit files, socketpairs, hard links, symlinks, batchfiles,
IPv6,              64-bit system inums, 64-bit internal inums
--


Since I am using rsync for most of my backups and file transfers, I am
VERY worried about this problem. Am I doing anything wrong?


	Michael






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