Glenn English wrote:

On Debian 3.1, 2.6.8 AMD86 SMP kernel...

I couldn't get amanda to backup some very large pieces of data (DLEs in
amandaspeak). They were 5 or 6 GB collections of sound files.

Turns out the problem was the iptables packet filter on the amanda
client. iptables has a timeout for idle TCP connections that was
breaking the connection to the server before the initial estimate of the
backup size was done (because it took so long to go through the huge
DLE).

The solution is to decrease the time between keepalive packets:

'echo 90 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time'

as described at:

http://documents.made-it.com/iptables-timeout.html

I don't think this will help, because the estimates are exchanged
using UDP traffic.

The backups are send over a TCP connection, but there you'll rarely
need to increase some timeout.

Are you realy 100% sure that it was this setting that made your
backups succeed?


--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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