Hi gang,
Once again I reply to my own email. Either I'm very smart or very stupid.
:) (That's rhetorical, don't answer.) ;)
<snip>
Has anyone come across the following error and can you tell me what it means
and how to fix it?
inflate returned -3 (200 bytes)
</snip>
This error started around the 27th, the server had to be rebooted the next
morning, I had backup problems over the next two days, and then I couldn't
turn the server on at all, period. What was happening? (The suspense!)
Well, turns out the power supply fan had been slowly dying, and had caused
the CPU to overheat and eventually fry to death. This explained all the
other problems, perhaps it had affected the rsync process. But no, after
replacing with a fresh CPU and power supply fan, I still kept getting this
error.
Then I noticed, hey, my other share is rsyncing fine, so something must have
changed within the share itself. Aha! A clue.
It occurred to me that this error started around the same time I had edited
some large zip files. I had removed a considerable amount of data from the
zip file, which had reduced the file size significantly. Rsync seemed to
crap out at this stage. A new zip file would have been fine, it was the
change in size of an existing zip file from, say, 500MB to 250MB, that
caused the grief.
So I deleted the old copies from the destination machine, and the newer
versions of the files came over no problem. I suppose I would have figured
this out sooner without the concurrent and non-related problems to cloud my
view.
I don't remember reading anything in the documentation about large changes
on large files, or large changes on large compressed files, but if there
were, forgive me for not paying closer attention to TFM.
Thanks for reading my little saga, and I hope this has been of use to
someone here.
Lillian Kulhanek
P.S. Rsync is a great utility.
