Xenforo ForumBackup addon transfers corrupted file to centminmod host

I really don't think this is a centminmod problem, but I thought I'd post it here because bigger brains and all.

---

I wrote a ForumBackup addon for XenForo that has an option to it to SFTP a local backup file to a remote server. It uses the phpssh2 library to accomplish this. It is a pretty simple step to provide a hostname, user, password, remote directoy, and the appropriate permissions for the remote file.

One user of the SFTP process is seeing that recently (April 28th), their backups (compressed gzip files) were being transferred to the backup host (running centminmod), but that the file sizes on the remote backup server were less than the local server. Also, it appears that the transferred gzip files are corrupted, they won't decompress.

So, the question is, why would those sftp transfers start failing on April 28th? Traditional SFTP transfers appears to work ok, but I'm going to try more testing with that. I've asked the user to see if there are any PHP warnings or errors on the web server side to indicate any type of transmission problem.

The user has commented that PHP was upgraded to 5.6.8 on April 16th, so that could also be a factor. It appears that there might be a newer version of php-ssh2 to use (0.12.3) for the php 5.6 branch, but I'm not certain of that because PECL says that version 0.12 is for PHP version 6.0 and below, but it says that for all versions too, lol. I'm not sure how to pinpoint if that's the real problem or not.

Would the centminmod server have any logs to look at, perhaps a ssh or sftp log? Would those entries be in /var/log/messages?

On a related note, I've heard that the phpseclib might be a good alternative to phpssh2. I doubt if it would provide any answers to this problem, but was curious if anybody has used it.

 

The file is compressed in PHP using gzip via an exec() call first, then the file is transferred via php-ssh2 as a separate step. The compressed file on the local machine is fine, but the corruption happens when it it transferred to the remote host.

I would agree that it could be a timeout/disconnect with the remote host, but I'm not sure where I'd see that, or why it would happen. I'll do some digging.

I'll see if I can get access to both machines to run some tests.

 

It was PHP 5.6.4, so not a big leap to 5.6.8, which is what he upgraded to

 

The php-ssh2 update didn't seem to fix the issue, I'm trying to dig into it more to find out if which server is really causing the problem, or if it's a disconnect type of thing. The tasks doesn't run more than a couple of seconds, so it hardly appears to be a time out situation.

Previously, I stated that centminmod was on the remote backup server, but actually, it's on the web server. They updated php-ssh2 via your instructions, and the same issue happens, although libssh2 is version 1.4.2, not your version 1.4.3. I assume that's because you are using a newer or beta centminmod?

Code:

[root@server ssh2-master]# php --ri ssh2

ssh2

SSH2 support => enabled
extension version => 0.12+dev
libssh2 version => 1.4.2
banner => SSH-2.0-libssh2_1.4.2
[root@server ssh2-master]#

 

Well, doing some more testing, this web server works fine to transfer the files to the backup server.
centminmod with PHP 5.4.39 and phpssh2 0.12 (libssh2 1.4.2)

But this particular server configuration doesn't, transferring to the same backup server.
centminmod with PHP 5.6.9 and phpssh2 0.12+dev (libssh2 1.4.2)

So all that means is that it doesn't appear to be the backup server, not even sure if its a PHP issue.

Will post an update if I find anything else out.

 

I'll check that out. The database is bigger than I thought on the transfer, so it takes a while for php to gzip it, and then transfer it to the backup server, I wonder if it's getting a php max execution time timeout doing all those tasks.

 

Yeah, my addon supports that, I'll try that out.

 

Well, we seemed to have confirmed that it isn't the web server, it's the backup server. Maybe a connection problem with the route or something.

I spun up a quick VPS with Vultr, and the user can use the addon to transfer their larger database backup to this vultr VPS, and I can transfer my own smaller XenForo databases to this server, but neither of us can transfer our backups to the shared hosting backupserver without getting a corrupted gzip file. Doesn't matter if gzip or pigz is used, the locally created file is fine, but something's awry in the transfer.
Trying to unzip the file results in:

Code:

name@server [~/backuptest]# gunzip forumbackup_today.sql.gz

gzip: forumbackup_today.sql.gz: unexpected end of file

So there must be a disconnect, timeout, or some other transfer problem going on with the backup server.

Thanks for your help, and thanks for the info on upgrading php-ssh2.