Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Crash due to IOError?

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Kristian,

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, [ISO-8859-1] Kristian R�nningen wrote:

> On a semi-regular basis I'm getting the following error while backing
> up a certain server, it seems to be some kind of IO-Error (disk or
> network), and was wondering if there was anything I could do to
> prevent this.
>
> The servers are running Debian Sarge, and its rdiff-backup package.
> rdiff-backup                 0.13.4-5
>
> rdiff-backup --version says 0.13.4

Is that the same version as the client? Could you update both sides to 
1.0.x?

>    nice -n 19 /usr/bin/rdiff-backup \

That's very nice. If anything CPU-intensive happens on your client, it 
will starve rdiff-backup for a long time, which could cause the following 
problem:

> ***** Mon Dec  4 11:36:35 CET 2006 :: Backup my.server.net starts
[...]
> Read from remote host my.server.net: Connection reset by peer
> Exception '[Errno 32] Broken pipe' raised of class
> 'exceptions.IOError':
[...]
> ***** Mon Dec  4 12:24:38 CET 2006 :: Backup my.server.net ends

The backup has been running for almost an hour. It's possible that 
there was no network activity for a long time between client and 
server, and some mischevious firewall has closed the connection?

Is there a firewall between client and server, and can you do anything to 
remove, replace or tune it not to break TCP connection?

Can you try running the backup without nice?

Can you enable TCP keepalives on the client? 
(/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_* on linux)

Can you provide a tcpdump for the connection, or at least the last few 
packets exchanged? (from the last successful ack from the server, to the 
reset, with timestamps)

Is it possible that rdiff-backup crashed or was killed on the server? Is 
there anything in the system logs around the time that the backup dies?

Cheers, Chris.
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