rsync failed: Too many links

Kent Miller
Sat, 01 Oct 2005 10:41:48 -0000

Dear Sir or Madam,
	Has anyone seen a error message like the following?

rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/home/kmiller/briefcase/1205275" failed:
Too
many links (31)
rsync: stat "/home/kmiller/briefcase/1205275" failed: No such file or
directory (2)

	As far as I can tell, I am not using any symlinks or hardlinks.
Please find below a reasonably complete bug report.  Please let me know
what I should do.

----------------------------------------------
                        BUG REPORT

A) VERSION

rsync 2.6.4-6 package in Debian Sarge

B) HEADLINE

rsync failed: Too many links

C) BUG DESCRIPTION

When attempting to use rsync to copy a "briefcase" directory from host
A to host B, not all of its contents (subdirectories and files) were
successfully transferred.  On host A the briefcase directory contains
96336 subdirectories (which contain in total 643740 files) occupying a
total of 6.73 GB.  After using rsync, the briefcase directory on host
B contains only 31998 subdirectories (which contain in total over
315666 files) occupying a total of 4.28 GB.  Rerunning rsync gives the
same error messages.

D) HOST DESCRIPTION

I have two Linux boxes, hostnames "darkstar-A" and
"darkstar-B".  Host
darkstar-A is a XEON box running Debian Woody.  Its home directory is
an NFS partition that sits on a RAID file server, which partition is
formated with NTFS.

kmiller@darkstar-A:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GH
kmiller@darkstar-A:~$ uname -a
Linux darkstar-A 2.4.27-2-686-smp #1 SMP Thu Jan 20 23:06:16 CET 2005 i686
unknown
kmiller@darkstar-A:~$ cat /etc/fstab
winbox:/home /home nfs defaults,soft 0 0

Host darkstar-B is an Acer Aspire 3610 laptop running Debian Sarge
3.1r0a.  Its home directory is an EXT3 partition (no RAID).

kmiller@darkstar-B:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.50GHz
kmiller@darkstar-B:~$ uname -a Linux
darkstar-B 2.6.8-2-686 #1 Thu May 19 17:53:30 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
kmiller@darkstar-B:~$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 0 2

E) WHAT I AM TRYING TO COPY FROM HOST A

On host darkstar-A I have a directory "briefcase" which contains 96336
directories, which in turn contain many files each (over 640000 in
total) occupying 6.73 GB.

kmiller@darkstar-A:~/briefcase$ ls -l | head
total 48168
drwx------    2 kmiller  winnfsg        64 Sep 12 03:29 1000032
drwx------    2 kmiller  winnfsg        64 Sep  3 20:42 1000142
...many lines deleted...
kmiller@darkstar-A:~/briefcase$ ls -l | tail
...many lines deleted...
drwx------    2 kmiller  winnfsg        64 Jul 20 01:54 950009
drwx------    2 kmiller  winnfsg        64 Aug 14 18:47 95185
kmiller@darkstar-A:~/briefcase$ ls -l | wc
  96337  867026 6163639
kmiller@darkstar-A:~$ rsync -avz localhost:briefcase/ | wc
Password:
 740076 3700380 53812107
kmiller@darkstar-A:~/briefcase$ du
46      1000032
32      1000142
...many lines deleted...
202     950009
102     95185
6729420 .

F) THE COMMAND GIVEN AND THE ERROR MESSAGES RECEIVED

Now let use rsync to copy recursively the "briefcase" directory from
host darkstar-A to an EXT3 partition onto host darkstar-B.

kmiller@darkstar-B:~$ rsync -v
rsync  version 2.6.4  protocol version 29
...many lines deleted...
kmiller@darkstar-B:~$ rsync -avuzbP -e ssh --exclude '*~'
darkstar-A:briefcase/ ~/briefcase/
kmiller@login.cap.american.edu's password:
receiving file list ...
744239 files to consider
....all progress lines deleted...
rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/home/kmiller/briefcase/1205275" failed:
Too
many links (31)
rsync: stat "/home/kmiller/briefcase/1205275" failed: No such file or
directory (2)
rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/home/kmiller/briefcase/1205276" failed:
Too
many links (31)
rsync: stat "/home/kmiller/briefcase/1205276" failed: No such file or
directory (2)
...many lines deleted...

G) WHAT WAS ACTUALLY TRANSFERRED

If appears that 31998 directories were copied.  They contain a total
of 315666 files, in all occupying 4.28 GB disk space.

kmiller@darkstar-4:~/briefcase$ ls -l | wc
  31999  255986 1951879
kmiller@darkstar-4:~$ rsync -avz localhost:briefcase/ | wc
Password:
 347668 1738340 25622562
kmiller@darkstar-4:~/briefcase$ du
60      ./1000032
44      ./1000142
....many lines deleted...
48      ./1205272
20      ./1205273
4285128 .

FIN

Sincerly Yours,
Kent