Rsync Mirroring Problems

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 09:52:30AM +1000, Dan Goodes wrote:
> rsync. The symptoms are a broken transfer, with the 'cryptic' error
> message:
> rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (1128806 bytes read so far)

This may mean that the remote rsync crashed, but it may also mean that
the connection went down beyond rsync's control.  To differentiate
what's happening you'll need to somehow gather extra data for what
happened on the remote system:

 - Enable crash-dump core production on the remote machine so that a
   crashed rsync produces a core file.
 - Attach a debugger to the remote rsync while it's running so that you
   can catch its exit condition.
 - Have someone look through the log files to see if the OS killed your
   process due to something such as too-much memory use.

Without such extra information it is impossible to know what is going
on.  However, one other sleuthing idea just occurred to me:  try using a
--bwlimit value to see if slowing rsync down might keep the connection
open for the whole transfer (some folks have reported that rsync
revealed that their network drivers/hardware were deficient in some way,
and their sporadic failure was taking down the connection).

..wayne..