Re: streaming header too small

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 11:09, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 07:34, Jaime Casanova <jaime(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was trying pg_basebackup on head, i used this command:
>> """
>> postgres(at)jaime:/usr/local/pgsql/9.2$ bin/pg_basebackup -D $PWD/data2
>> -x stream -P -p 54392
>> """
>>
>> i got this error
>> """
>> 19093/19093 kB (100%), 1/1 tablespace
>> pg_basebackup: streaming header too small: 17
>> pg_basebackup: child process exited with error 1
>> """
>>
>> now, this streaming header size is defined in
>> src/bin/pg_basebackup/receivelog.c as "#define STREAMING_HEADER_SIZE
>> (1+8+8+8)", so WTF is this?
>> what are these numbers? shouldn't be at least a comment explaining
>> those? more important it's seems obvious something broke that, unless
>
> Those numbers are the size of WalDataMessageHeader - a struct which is
> not available in the frontend, or at least wasn't at the time.
>
>> i misunderstood something which is completely possible, and that the
>> way is do it it will broke again in the future if the header change
>
> Without looking at the details, I'm pretty sure it's the keepalive
> message patch (64233902d22ba42846397cb7551894217522fad4).That one does
> introduce a new message that's exactly that size.
>
> pg_basebackup assumes the only kind of messages that can arrive are
> the data messages, and this is no longer true. But if you check the
> code for pg_basebackup, you'll see it checks the size of the message
> *before* it checks the type of the message, which is why you get a
> misleading error.
>
> I'll dig into the details later - but you could try backing out that
> patch to confirm if that's the problem.

Confirmed that is it, and attached are two patches to fix it. The
first one I intend to backport to 9.1, since it just fixes the error
message. The other one is for 9.2. I'll also look at a better way to
get that structure size. comments?

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/