Filesystem panic

[Morten]

Hi,

I'm running RH9, 2.4.20-18.9. Each night, the server mounts
an external FAT32 disk using firewire, and performs backups
to it using rsync.

Twice within the past 3 months, the backup process has resulted
in machine crash (complete hang, hardware reboot needed).

 From /var/log/messages:

Oct 22 04:02:20 yoda kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 08:21).
Oct 22 04:02:20 yoda kernel:   fat_free: deleting beyond EOF
Oct 22 04:02:20 yoda kernel:   File system has been set read-only

 From the rsync error log, I can see that the filesystem becomes
read-only, and that it begins to fail the synchronization task with

mkstemp 
SAGER_igangvaerende/2003_07_Fremtidens_Uni/Fase_4/Diagrammer/Celletyper/
.Delecelle.psd.Rz49bM failed: Read-only file system

Which is understandable. After doing this for a while, the error
message changes to "Too many open files". And I suspect that this is
what causes the machine to hang. Is there any way to configure rsync
to abort execution once the first error occurs?

Thanks in advance,

Morten