Select and read sockets (Unix) - sockets

Question

I have an intermittent problem with a telnet based server on Unix (the problem crops up on both AIX and Linux).
The server opens two sockets, one to a client telnet session, and one to a program running on the same machine as the server. The idea is that the data is passed through the server to and from this program.
The current setup has a loop using select to wait for a "read" file descriptor to become available, then uses select to wait for a "write" file descriptor to become available.
Then the program reads from the incoming file descriptor, then processes the data before writing to the outgoing descriptor.
The snippet below shows what is going on. The problem is that very occasionally the read fails, with errno being set to ECONNRESET or ETIMEDOUT. Neither of these are codes documented by read, so where are they coming from?
The real question is, how can I either stop this happening, or handle it gracefully?
Could doing two selects in a row be the problem?
The current handling behaviour is to shut down and restart. One point to note is that once this happens it normally happens three or four times, then clears up. The system load doesn't really seem to be that high (it's a big server).
if (select(8, &readset, NULL, NULL, NULL) < 0)
{
break;
}
if (select(8, NULL, &writeset, NULL, NULL) < 0)
{
break;
}
if (FD_ISSET(STDIN_FILENO, &readset)
&& FD_ISSET(fdout, &writeset))
{
if ((nread = read(STDIN_FILENO, buff, BUFFSIZE)) < 0)
{
/* This sometimes fails with errno =
ECONNRESET or ETIMEDOUT */
break;
}
}

Answer 1

Look at the comments in http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/mips/include/asm/errno.h on lines 85 and 98: these basically say there was a network connection reset or time out. Check and see if there are timeouts you can adjust on the remote network program, or send some periodic filler bytes to ensure that the connection stays awake consistently. You may just be victim of an error in the network transit path between the remote client and your local server (this happens to me when my DSL line hiccups).
EDIT: not sure what the downvote is for. The man page for read explicitly says:
Other errors may occur, depending on the object connected to fd.
The error is probably occuring in the select, not in the read: you're not checking errors after the select, you're just proceeding to the read, which will fail if the select returned an error. I'm betting if you check the errno value after the select call you'll see the errors: you don't need to wait for the read to see the errors.