Problem with tar

[Morten Eriksen]

Hi,

I have a problem with Cygwin tar which I have a hard time figuring out how
to solve, and I'm hoping someone here can give me a few hints.

Background: I'm partly responsible for administrating 30 remote WinNT
servers (don't ask..), and to fetch data from these servers to include in
a local site backup I use a combination of ssh, tar and scp (sshd has been
installed on the WinNT servers.) 

Every night, for each of the servers, I run approximately this sequence of
commands:

ssh -x -l administrator $ntserver "/bin/tar cvzf /tmp/data.tgz /data"
scp administrator@$ntserver:/tmp/data.tgz data-$ntserver.tgz

Works like a charm, except that tar hangs at what seems like random places
at what seems like random times at what seems like random sites. :^(
Out of the 30 servers, 2-3 on average have this problem every night, and I
have to manually kill the ssh process when I come to work in the morning.
I can't see no patterns on with which sites gets the problem or the data
which tar was trying to read when the hang occurred. Manually running tar
again on the same data doesn't hang again in a reproducible way.

Are there, or have there been, any know problems with tar or the
cygwin.dll in Cygwin which could cause this? If not, does anyone have any
ideas on how I could debug this problem? Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

I have attached the output from "cygcheck.exe -s -r -v" in case that is of
any help. "/bin/tar --version" says "tar (GNU tar) 1.12". 


Regards,
Morten Eriksen