[mirror-admin] file has vanished / IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion

[Carlos Carvalho]

Chuck Anderson (cra at wpi.edu) wrote on 26 April 2010 13:40:
 >On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:56:00AM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
 >> Has any progress been made on these errors which I get almost every 
 >> time I sync recently:
 >> 
 >> file has vanished ...
 >> 
 >> IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion
 >> 
 >> Does anyone know of a way to have rsync ignore the "file has vanished 
 >> errors" so that it doesn't skip file deletion?  The deletion skipping 
 >> is contributing to me running out of disk space.
 >
 >Found the answer to the latter issue:
 >
 >rsync --ignore-errors

Sure. However, be careful with it; there's a reason it's not the
default. If someone messes with the permissions and blocks access, or
upstream gets the dreadful "stale nfs file handle", your repo will be
wiped...

rsync will not skip deletion when a file simply disappears; it
produces the "file has vanished" message, returns with exit status 24
and does removals. It only skips deletion, and returns with code 23,
when it sees the file during the stat() that precedes the pulling, but
it has disappeared when rsync tries to pull it. Or, if you use
files-from, when it finds those names upstream while checking the file
list but no longer at pull time. The reason for skipping removals is
because in this case not finding the file may be the consequence of an
I/O error on the server.

I often get "file has vanished" from sync.fedoraproject but only
rarely get return code 23. So there might be some problem with your
upstream or your updates.

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