BackupPc fails with SIGPIPE

I've invesitgate on the meaning of sigpipe. As described in SIGPIPE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

On POSIX-compliant platforms, SIGPIPE is the signal sent to a process when it attempts to write to a pipe without a process connected to the other end. ...

So I suspected that the trouble was with the ssh transport that gets disconnected.

I've setup a longer timeout to ssh using the options -o ServerAliveInterval=300, in the config:

$Conf{RsyncClientCmd} = '$sshPath -o ServerAliveInterval=300 -q -x -l root $host
 $rsyncPath $argList+';

Now the backup has complete successfully!

Just in case this is useful to others, we were getting both aborted by signal=PIPE and Child exited prematurely on some backups (only incremental backups it would seem). Adjusting the $Conf(RsyncClientCmd) didn't work for our installation of BackupPc 3.1 on Centos 5 (soon to be upgraded), as it broke the attempt to connect in the first place. We are using rsync over ssh.

As the machine was dedicated to doing backups and we were concerned about others using ssh access, we simply set ClientAliveInterval=300 in /etc/ssh/sshd_conf on the client machines (not the BackupPc server), but this could have been done for the individual login instead.