Re: Intermittent network failures normal?

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 12/03/11 09:15, Jeff Rizzo wrote:
> I haven't dug deeply into this yet, but I seem to get "Too many network
> failures" a sizeable percentage (10%+) of the time when using tarsnap (1.0.30
> and 1.0.31) from a fairly well-connected location (and also from my home
> system).

Hmm, that's not good.  I'm not seeing anything server-side to explain this; has
anyone else been seeing significant rates of network-failure errors?

> I haven't yet checked whether it's MAX_RECONNECTS or
> MAX_RECONNECTS_AWOL that is being exceeded, but I'm curious whether this is
> something others experience as well.  It makes nightly backups a hit-or-miss
> affair...

Easy way to distinguish: If you're hitting MAX_RECONNECTS, you'll have several
"Connection list, waiting X seconds before reconnecting" messages printed first.

> I can easily enough bump those values in my own copy of the source to see if it
> fixes things, but that's a bit of a maintenance issue for new versions. 
> Assuming bumping one or both of these fixes things for me, might it not be a
> useful thing to be able to set in the config file or from the command line?

It shouldn't be necessary for you to increase those values... if you're hitting
them that often, something is broken somewhere.  Which ISP are you using?  Is it
possible that they're doing something nasty (like injecting RST packets)?

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid