[ale] very intermittent weird SCP failure?

[Neal Rhodes]

We have a client running a ----------------------------- application on
three linux servers running 

Linux HDISATBE3 2.6.32-696.1.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Apr 11 17:13:24 UTC
2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The two primary event servers accumulate a file of connection/heartbeat
activity, and once a week, a crontab job does an SCP of this file to the
backend server, which imports these two files to calculate uptime.   The
respective user has ssh host equivalence, so this proceeds without
password challenge. 

This has worked for about 10 years. 

Very occasionally, like, once in 3 months, we will find the copied file
on the backend server is garbled, to wit: 

        - total size is correct; matches source
        - the first XXX bytes of the file is NULL characters. 
        

Which hoses up everything.   I usually figure out which file is
boogered, re-do the scp by hand, and re-do the import.  Then all is
well. 

I am just bumfuzzled as to what would cause this.   It's always on the
front of the file. 

I should check and see exactly how many NULLS, but usually when it
happens my hair is on fire.   I'm guessing about 512 or 1K. 

Neal Rhodes
MNOP Ltd

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