[rdiff-backup-users] SpecialFileError ... Socket error: AF_UNIX path too long

[Patrick Nagel]

Hi there,

I'm new to rdiff-backup, and so far I find it to be a great tool. During this 
night's (incremental, the script runs for the 5th time or so) backup of four 
vservers, I encountered a batch of errors that looked like:

SpecialFileError var/run/dovecot/auth-worker.2765 Socket error: AF_UNIX path 
too long
SpecialFileError var/run/dovecot/login/default Socket error: AF_UNIX path too 
long
SpecialFileError var/spool/postfix/private/anvil Socket error: AF_UNIX path 
too long
SpecialFileError var/spool/postfix/private/auth Socket error: AF_UNIX path too 
long
SpecialFileError var/spool/postfix/private/bounce Socket error: AF_UNIX path 
too long
[...]

It happened on every vserver that had postfix and/or dovecot running. But it 
never happened during the previous four runs, which I find odd - those 
sockets should have been in place during the last backups, too.

I read that it's not a critical problem 
(http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/rdiff-backup-users/2008-01/msg00020.html) 
and at least one other thread on this mailing list. I'm currently not using 
the --exclude-sockets option - but from what I read it doesn't help 
suppressing these error messages.
Also I think that the error message can't be right. It has been said that 
there is a limit at 107 characters - but my path (even when I include the 
target prefix, which is 22 chars long in my setup), I only come to a max. of 
60 chars.

So I think it would be good if somebody with a clue (which excludes me) could 
have a look at the source and check what's really going on, and find a 
solution for this issue (that has been multiply reported, for example also 
here: http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/SpecialFileError).

Patrick.

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