git clone ends with Broken Pipe

Solved! I used a DNS name for connecting to the gitlab server, and what I didn't know: This name has been resolved to the external IP of the same server, so, the server and the client were not in the same subnet.

So, the client connected to the external IP of the server, so the firewall had to NAT it back to the server.

The solution was quite simple: I just added the hostname with the internal ip to the client machine's /etc/hosts file and from that on the clone worked like a charm.

Regarding GitLab, this thread mentions (for a similar error)

I solved that issue (unable to checkout large repo' via HTTP) by editing git/config/unicorn.yml and setting timeout to 120, when it was previously 30, and restarting the gitab service.

If this is not only about the Git hosting server, but about Git itself, then you have other options to try:

• The remote end hung up unexpectedly while git cloning
• fatal: early EOF fatal: index-pack failed