I've got a script that has been throwing an intermittant error for the past month. Before that, it ran fine for over two years. The script connects to an ftp server and retrieves a bunch of binary files then processes them into our database. It runs once/hour and now it's failing about 50% of the time.

The error message is 'bad file number' and it's failing while attempting to connect to the remote server. The section of code where it fails is:

   my $ftp = Net::FTP->new( $ftpHost, Debug => 0 );
   
   if( ! $ftp ) {
       LogUtils::error( "Couldn't connect to '$ftpHost' ($@ : $!)" );
       print( "Couldn't connect to '$ftpHost' ($@ : $!)\n" );
       exit( -1 );
   }
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And the actual message that gets logged is "Couldn't connect to 'ftp.meteorlogix.com' ( : Bad file number)".

The system it runs on is Solaris. Oddly, the exact same script runs in our dev environment just fine (connects to the same remote server, once/hour). It has also run without errors every time that I've manually run it.

I've set Debug to 1 and captured the output:

Net::FTP: Net::FTP(2.65)
Net::FTP:   Exporter(5.562)
Net::FTP:   Net::Cmd(2.21)
Net::FTP:   IO::Socket::INET(1.25)
Net::FTP:     IO::Socket(1.26)
Net::FTP:       IO::Handle(1.21)

Net::FTP: Unexpected EOF on command channel at /local/rtp/rtp-0.4/bin/
+meteorlogix line 215
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That output doesn't change when I add the Passive => 1 to the constructor options either.

Any ideas??

Dave