On 2017-07-05 09:06, Jenkins, Wade William wrote:

I’ve been wrestling with a BackupPC 4 install since March (updating to each successive release as they come). All but one of my servers backs up perfectly fine. One of my 3 file servers (all software-identical) routinely encounters “rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(226)” where it then sits until the timeout period has passed (though, the past few backups have hung well beyond the timeout period).

I’ve tried changing the backup method to tar from rsync, moving directories from filesystem to filesystem, and looking for/fixing messed up file attributes. These have offered temporary relief from the problem, but it seems that the second incremental backup after the ‘fix’ is attempted will hang indefinitely.

Does anyone have any thoughts about how to troubleshoot this kind of problem?

—

Wade Jenkins

rsync can be somewhat vague about what has gone wrong, especially if something is going wrong at the other end of the transaction: the first thing to note is that the BackupPC side does not have the details because it is the remote side that is encountering some kind of issue, so you'll need to engage more detailed troubleshooting on that side.

It helps to have a sense of what typically goes wrong with (a properly configured) rsync — media failure, filesystem corruption, resource exhaustion, capability/version mismatch, ssh issues, network problems, permission issues — these all fall into the generic catch-all error you're seeing on the remote end.

For troubleshooting, you can log the remote side in detail or trace it to identify what the exact issue is. Using tar implies that media failure may not be the cause, but not necessarily, as tar and rsync read files a bit differently. You'll want to look at whether the failures always occur at the same place, and if rsync itself turns up nothing obvious, the network/ssh should be examined.

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