[BackupPC-devel] rsync(d) compression chokes backuppc

[Peter G. <gr...@gr...>]

Hello,

My backup "suddenly" died a week ago.

Familiar story for developers, and emails starting like that make that
funny chilly feeling of "poor bastard, he didn't realise that
unexplained random errors are close to impossible to fix". Good news,
I got lucky, I believe at least I know the problem, and avoided it. :)

I reconfigured the whole mess and (among other uninteresting
changes) included "--compress" in my rsyncd process' param list.
The results were catastrophic: backups that took 200 minutes usually
died in 200-400 minutes by "received signal=ALRM" or "Child exited  
prematurely"
with no other visible reason (it would be neat to have a bit explanation
about these errors in logfile for the inexperienced or clueless,  
translating
it to "timeout on server/on client/local rsync probably died/remote rsync
probably died/etc"). Zero backups were done on several machines.

I tried various voodoo tricks and finally removed --compress, and
things became shiny happy again.

"Is this the way it has always been?
  Could it ever have been different?"
                              -- Pink Floyd

Thanks,
Peter