[lug] ftp problem

[Gary Hodges]

Thought I would run this by the experts here...

I have a Perl script running on two remote machines that tars and 
compresses a directory of data and uses the Net::FTP module to send the 
file to a machine here in our lab.  On one machine (both are Debian 
Sarge) it has been running fine since the first of the year.  I just set 
up the same script on the second machine and the uploaded files often, 
but not always, have problems.  When a problem file is uncompressed and 
untarred it gives the following error:

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Read 9089 bytes from 20050307.tar.gz
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

It does extract files, but many files from the day of data are randomly 
missing.  That is, we'll have something like

20050307182100.jpg
20050307182200.jpg
20050307182600.jpg
20050307182700.jpg

Notice that minutes 23 through 25 are missing.  The missing files exist 
on the remote machine and are part of the created tar file, but during 
the transfer they are lost.  The machine in question is located behind a 
rather strick DOE firewall.  Getting permission to set this machine up 
took forever.  The hard part was getting permission to remotely access 
it, but I was told that sending data out from this machine shouldn't be 
a problem.

Is it possible the firewall is stripping files out of the tar archive or 
should we look somewhere else?

Thanks,
Gary