Subject: Interrupted uploads

From: "Homer W. Smith" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 20:56:36 -0500 (EST)

I am getting continuous complaints about interrupted uploads
to ftp particularly for big files.  They are not limited to modem
uploads, but also over ethernet from other sites.
 
    The evidence of these broken uploads is a continuous accumulation of
hung ftpd processes which I have to clear out periodically, something
y'all have been talking about recently. 

    One thing that has not been brought up is the earlier problem of
the broken connections in the first place.

    This seems to be a serious problem that I can not discount as
dirty lines any more.
 
     Homer

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homer Wilson Smith     News, Web, Telnet      Art Matrix - Lightlink
(607) 277-0959         SunOS 4.1.4 Sparc 20   Internet Access, Ithaca NY
[email-masked]    [email-masked]     http://www.lightlink.com

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From: "Mike Ellwood, CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, GB" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 14:38:40 +0000 (GMT)

>     This seems to be a serious problem that I can not discount as

Same here. Do you get "lost connection" messages in the debug log? 

It would seem that there is no retry facility in the protocol,
at least not an effective one. (Anyone more knowledgeable care
to comment?)
Is there potential for improvement here in a future BETA?

[email-masked]
(actually running the latest "production" version, not any of
 the more recent BETAs).

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From: Andrew Bennett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 12:42:00 -0800 (PST)

> y'all have been talking about recently. 

I've got something similiar.

I applied Vidiot's patch tp ftpd.c (Sorry, I forget your email address), 
and it now removes processes that hang retrieving files.  But every now 
and then a process will hang when storing a file.

One of my users frequently hangs a ftp storage process.  He uses crl.com, 
and they are running SunOS 4.1.3, and his ftp client is /usr/ucb/ftp.
He'll upload several files (usually they are small (<100k)) and then it 
will hang.  He told me he waits a minute, then shells out, kills the ftp 
client process on his side, and opens another and re-does the transfer.  
Unfortunately, upon killing the client, the server process is now stuck.

I've got some other instances I'm trying to track down hung storing 
processes.

I'm running BSDI 2.0.  In all honesty, I think these patches that kill 
hung connections are a band-aid to the real problem.  I'm still running 
beta-9, and probably will install beta-10 sometime this week or this weekend.

Even though the machine is the home of the Apache web server, we still 
need ftp!  :)

Andrew
--

  Andrew Bennett
  [email-masked], [email-masked]
  http://taz.hyperreal.com/~abennett/