Topic: Flexbackup Failing after SMP

[Mike Drummond]

My server (IBM ALTServer) has a Sony DDS2  DAT Tape drive.  This was working fine under  e-smith 4.10.  I have since upgraded to SME 5.0 and installed all the blades. In addition I have added a second processor.  The 4.10 version correctly identified the server as dual processor and gave me the dual/up boot option even though at the time there was only one processor in the box.

The tape drive status lights do not indicate a problem and I have used a cleaning tape on the drive.  

My nightly backups are now failing refer below.  The error has occured on two consectuive nights using different tapes. The problem may not be related to the upgrade and I would appreciate any suggestions on a where to from here to identify the problem.

Regards
Mike Drummond

*******************
flexbackup version 0.9.8
/etc/flexbackup.conf syntax OK

|------------------------------------------------
| Doing level 0 backup of all using dump
| Retensioning tape...
| Rewinding & erasing tape...
| Creating index key 200201170110.54
| Tape #0
| Filesystems = / /boot
|------------------------------------------------
At block 0.
|------------------------------------------------
| File number 1, index key 200201170110.54
| Backup of: /
| Date of this level 0 backup: Thu Jan 17 01:10:54 2002
| Date of last level 0 backup: the epoch
|------------------------------------------------
| (dump -0 -b 10 -a -f - / | gzip -4) | buffer -m 3m -s 10k -u 100 -t -p 75 -B \
|  -o /dev/nst0
|------------------------------------------------
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Thu Jan 17 01:10:54 2002
  DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch
  DUMP: Dumping /dev/hda6 (/) to standard output
  DUMP: Label: none
  DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
  DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
  DUMP: estimated 7731744 tape blocks.
  DUMP: Volume 1 started at: Thu Jan 17 01:14:47 2002
  DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
  DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files]
buffer (writer): write of data failed: Input/output error
bytes to write=10240, bytes written=-1, total written         10K
  DUMP: Broken pipe
  DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.

[Bill Coghill]

I also have this problem after updating to 5.1b4 from 4.1.2.  It worked OK before.

Tape drive is a HP C1554A - identified as a C1537A which is just another name for the DDS3 DAT Drive.

Same error as Mike reported.

This is my development server so I don't mind that its broken - but I'd like to get to the bottom of the problem.

[Mike Drummond]

I have been looking further into this and trying at least to get dump to tape to work.  It appears it is working now but with lots of playing around with mt commands, flexbackup etc it hard to tell what I did.  

I supect it might have been when I set flexbackup to perform an erase first then issued a signal-event console-save.

Regards
Mike