Crashes maybe due to: "error writing 4 unbuffered bytes"

[jw schultz]

On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 01:08:48PM -0700, Trevor Marshall wrote:
> I have been trying to implement  Mike's tutorial on backup with rsync, but
> my server has kept crashing in the middle of the rsync transfer.
> 
> I am backing up  /dev/hda1  to  /dev/hdc1 on a SuSe v 7.3  i386 box
> 
> Server crashed 8 times. 16 fsck and 8 reboots later I finally got an error
> message and a graceful exit from rsync. Somewhere in the middle of the
> crashes I compiled and installed the 2.5.4 stable version.
> 
> Here is the error dialog:
> 
> building file list ... done
> var/log/httpd/
> var/log/httpd/access.combined.8sep02.log
> var/log/httpd/access.combined.log
> var/log/httpd/error_log
> rsync: error writing 4 unbuffered bytes - exiting: Broken pipe
> rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(464)
> rsync: error writing 70 unbuffered bytes - exiting: Broken pipe
> rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(464)
> 
> A search of Google Usenet showed two identical incidents in June 2002.
> 
> Is there any hope of my resolving this without  too many more crashes?

If running rsync crashes your (non-MS) server you have a
problem with the server, not rsync.  On a linux system
application caused system crashes are either bad hardware or
kernel bugs.

Unless you have tweaked out SuSE i would say you have a
hardware problem.  Rsync will stress some parts of the
system so that is probably why you haven't had crashes
before.

Look in the system logs.  The pipe errors seem more likely
to be cause by bad memory than disk.

-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt