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

[jw schultz]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 11:53:04AM -0500, Nate Case wrote:
> I'm experiencing some unexpected behavior with rsync v2.5.6.  After
> looking around it seems like several people have experienced similar
> problems in the past, but those appear to be old bugs that are solved now.
>  Also doesn't appear to be any direct bugfixes made for this issue since
> 2.5.6.
> 
> The strange thing is that things seem to work when I use ssh for
> transport.  However now I need to switch to using the rsync daemon
> directly and this problem has arose.
> 
> I'm pushing local data to a remote rsync backup server:
> 
> ---[snip]---
> # rsync -a -v --modify-window=2 /backup/Source/Dir/
> user at xx.xx.xx.xx::backup/dest
> Password:
> building file list ... rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4092
> bytes: phase "send_file_entry": Broken pipe
> rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(515)
> ---[snip]---
> 
> With more -v's, I end up with the same message at the end, but it's
> preceeded by a bunch of lines like this (filenames altered):
> 
> make_file(3,file1)
> make_file(3,file2)
> make_file(3,file3)
> make_file(3,file4)
> 
> It stops on the same file each time.  I tried deleting this file to see if
> it's just choking on a particular file (or type of file), but in that case
> it just chokes on the next file (different type) in the directory.  The
> files in this directory are no bigger than 2MB.  If I remove the
> subdirectory entirely, it still just dies on the next file it encounters.
> 
> The directories that I'm syncing do have a large number of files, but as I
> mentioned earlier, it does seem to work when using "-e ssh".  I do not
> seem to be running out of memory.  I also tried the same parameters but
> breaking it up into smaller subdirectories, and it still failed after X
> amount of files with the same error (I did not determine whether or not X
> is always the same with using other directories).  Note that this is
> always occuring in the "building file list" stage, and not the actual file
> transfer.
> 
> After looking at io.c, it seems like the problem (rather, the symptom) for
> this error message is a failed write() call (which explains the Broken
> Pipe message to stderr).  I thought maybe --blocking-io would avoid this
> issue, but it still happened when using --blocking-io.

It would seem that the server process (forked off from the
daemon) is dying.  Look in the rsyncd log file (may be
syslog) for clues.

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

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt