Re: Crashes in Net::FTP

Roland,

We are using Net::FTP to send a toal of several thousand files per day from
from several Windows NT systems to a Solaris serrver.  It has worked quite
well for us most of the time.  We began having problems that sound similar to
yours after a major power and network outage left two of our 100Base-T
ethernet switches with incompatible duplex settings.

The switches talked to each other when the network was not busy, but lost
packets when the network was busy.  This was tested by using ping. Ping
never lost packets by itself, but if ping was run while the files were being
transferred, packets were lost.  The only error that Perl gave was a
Timeout.  Retries of the ftp->put failed, because the server had
disconnected.

We are running 5.005_03 on those systems, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.626
also gave the same error.  Sorry, I do not know the line number where
Timeout was raised.  I am not certain that the error I saw is the same as
yours, but it looks similar.  The solution to our problem was to get the
network equipment configured properly, and the Timeouts went away.

I wasted several days digging into Net::FTP trying to track this problem
down, before deciding it was a network problem.  You might have a
Net::FTP problem, but don't ignore the network itself.

I hope this was helpful.

Roland Schoenbaechler wrote:

> I'm using ActivePerl-5.6.1.626 for Windows NT from Active-State. I want to
> transfer hundreds of files a day using Net::FTP.  Sometimes, the following
> error occurs: Timeout at C:/Perl/site/lib/Net/FTP/dataconn.pm line 71. This
> results in failures in the file transfer. Below I have listed the script
> (%main::ftp_files is a hash with the local path and filename as the key and
> the remote path and filename as value) and the STDERR of the script (I
> scipped some lines; line 261 mentioned in the STDERROR is the put command).
>
> Do you know the reason for the interruption of the FTP?
>
>  Soon I will have to run this script also with Sun Solaris. Do you think
> this problem will also occur with Sun Solaris?
>
> Thanks a lot for your help
>
> Roland Schoenbaechler

> ... Perl source and debugging output deleted ...

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James D. White
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Chemistry & Biochemistry
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