Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:45:48 -0500 From: Peggy Wilkins <mozart@lib.uchicago.edu> To: "Jack L. Stone" <jacks@sage-american.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: support quality (Re: dump | restore fails: unknown tape headertype 1853384566) Message-ID: <pvfxh1ek4j.wl%mozart@lib.uchicago.edu> In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20090325072137.00ee6b48@sage-american.com> References: <49C9E635.5010106@kkip.pl> <49C83673.3000604@aldan.algebra.com> <200903251820.54749.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <200903251925.36108.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <3.0.1.32.20090325072137.00ee6b48@sage-american.com>
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>>>>> Jack L Stone <jacks@sage-american.com> writes:
>> I've been watching this thread with some interest since we've had some
>> similar problems with dump/restore which we use every morning via cron
>> scripts on a number of servers to produce bootable clones as part of our
>> backup program. Have been doing this for years and also never saw a problem
>> as most of you say. We prefer dump/restore for backups.
>> However, last month upon upon upgrading those servers from FBSD-6.3px
>> (RELEASE) to 7.0px (RELEASE) we found that about one-half of the servers
>> had a similar problem as the original poster while the other half did not.
>> All of the servers (rackmounts) use the same (type) hardware. We spent many
>> hours trying to solve the problem with those that failed to dump/restore.
>> Also, searched for any others with the problem and only found a very few,
>> but without solutions to this issue. (Indeed, the only one was a reference
>> to any efforts to restore an older OS version which didn't apply here).
[snip]
>> SOLUTION
>> The "clones" are a very important pasrt of our backup program. Since the
>> dump side of the problems simply stuck and provided no error message at all
>> and the errors from any restores were not useful, our only solution was to
>> revert back to FBSD-6.3 on those servers with this issue and dump/restore
>> went back to working again. We left those that were working on FBSD-7.0-R
>> and they continue to work okay.
I was seeing this same problem on all my 64-bit systems: FreeBSD-7
dump would hang at a random point. Dump continues to work flawlessly
for me on FreeBSD-7/i386.
I ran across this which includes a patch:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=121684
The kernel patch linked to there solved the problem for me, but I am
running many production systems and am unwilling to apply this patch
to -RELEASE every time there is a kernel update (I just use the
standard GENERIC kernel which I get via freebsd-update). I now live
without dump on amd64. Apparently this fix is waiting on some related
issue; and I will be very happy when it makes it to the officially
released kernel.
plw
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