Re: [rdiff-backup-users] failing link(2) results in unhandled exception

[dean gaudet]

> >>>>> dean gaudet <address@hidden>
> >>>>> wrote the following on Sun, 4 Apr 2004 17:11:05 -0700 (PDT)
>
> > i had rdiff-backup 0.11.0 running smoothly for over a year and
> > recently started having problems with it failing to complete a
> > backup.  figuring i was long overdue for an upgrade i moved to deb
> > unstable recent which is 0.13.3.jgoerzen-3 ... i'm still having
> > problems with the backup failing to complete.
> ...
> >     self.conn.os.link(linkpath, self.path)
> > OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
> ...
> > rdiff-backup already knows that link is going to fail, and yet it
> > goes ahead and does it -- but more importantly is that it results in
> > the traceback above.  the final write is the beginning of it bailing
> > out and printing the traceback.
> >
> > it would be preferable not to bail out on this error -- i'm pretty
> > sure what's happenned here is that the .../155/61018/ directory has
> > disappeared on the source (yeah i'm bad and backing up from a
> > non-snapshot source).
>
> I think I just fixed this in CVS.  But I'm still not sure how you
> managed to run into this problem repeatedly.  To replicate it I had to
> make three hardlinked files, and then delete the first after it had
> been stat()ed and before it starts getting read.

in the end i'm convinced that this link error was temporary (although i
still don't know what i did to cause it :)... it seems the main problem
i've been having with rdiff-backup is not rdiff-backup's fault -- it's
because of using bittorrent -- and bittorrent appears to act like a DoS
on my NAT causing it to overflow its connection table... and somehow
the rdiff-backup ssh session through the NAT gets dropped frequently
when this happens.  at least that's my current working hypothesis :)

but thanks for looking into the link error.

oh hmm you know -- i use qmail, which does a lot of hardlinking in
/var/qmail/queue and behaves somewhat like you describe.

-dean