Keeping erroring out every night

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011, Shai wrote:
>
>   Hello list,
>   I have a cron that runs a sync processes every night. Lately, it began
>   erroring out with this error:
>
>     rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (217717 bytes received so far)
>     [sender]
>     rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(601)
>     [sender=3.0.7]
>
...
>   I can't make out why there is a connection issue, and when I tried
>   running this twice, manually (ie. run the script manually and not from
>   cron), it never failed.

When I've seen things like this it was usually something like a
disk-full problem on the receiving end or a network problem.

This usually happens after midnight when all our systems are
doing daily maintenance runs including cross-machine backups
using rsync, a period where some large files may be created
leaving marginal space on a drive which don't show up in the
morning after the maintenance runs complete and clean up.

I would look at the rsync and system logs on the receiving
machine around the time of the failures.

Bill
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