UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have been tasked with getting an AIX 4.3.3 box to backup to a NAS applicance device which provides NFS service. It is an intermediary repository so that other tools can transport the resulting backup file to another NAS Applicance at a remote site on a secondary frame connection.

Anyone have some ideas?

I have tried tar but it aborts at 2Gbyte.

backup commmand aborts at 2Gbyte limit also.

I have increased hard ulimits to:

time(seconds) unlimited
file(blocks) unlimited
data(kbytes) unlimited
stack(kbytes) unlimited
memory(kbytes) unlimited
coredump(blocks) 2097151
nofiles(descriptors) 2000

The NAS Appliance guys said to use cpio so I tried the following:

find / ! -fstype nfs ! -type s -print | cpio -oc $BUPFILE
This seems to work in that it goes beyond the 2GB limit from command line under my login and root.

When same command line is in script with >>$MAILMSG 2>&1
added on the end I get the echo line before the command in the mail message and a series of numbers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Fri Aug 29 02:25:46 PDT 2003] actual 'backup' command begins ...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
0707070000010000010407770000020000020000330000130772334652000000200000000000.


Need help

c'mon guys and gals 24 views and not a single idea!!

Post your script - and realize that not everyone has a NA server in their data centers (ours was retired four months ago - after we found out it was obsolete and we could not get maintenance on it ).

The actual script is too long. I exceed the 10000 character limit.
I don't readily see a way to attach a file to the message.
It does a fair amount of housekeeping prior to the backup

Rats!

The copy command line is given at the top of the thread.

Here is what it looks like in the actual script:

echo "${line}" >> $MAILMSG
#
# do the actual backup
#
datestamp "actual 'backup' command begins ..."
echo "${line}" >> $MAILMSG
cd $STARTDIR
find . ! -fstype nfs ! -type s -print | /bin/cpio -oc >$TAPEDRIVE >>$MAILMSG 2>&
1


I have been able to confirm that I get to the echo "${line}" >> $MAILMSG as shown at beginning of thread
Then I get the series of numbers and the filesize ends up 0


Any ideas would help!
Thx

I would certainly expect that to fail!

> $TAPEDRIVE
send stdout to $TAPEDRIVE

>> $MAILMSG
send stdout to $MAILMSG in append mode

If you really want to mail yourself a copy of the cpio output you will need to use tee or something. Since you were complaining that the output was more than 2 GB, expect a lengthy mail message.

$TAPEDRIVE is the variable. It is defined earlier in the script as

/mavesbu/backup

The directory /mavesbu is the nfs network appliance device.

I wish there was room to put the whole script.

The script is modified to point the backup to the nfs device rather than the tapedrive.
We have been using the script for several years to backup to tape using the backup command. I have modified to use the cpio command and set the variables to point to the directory and file that it should create but cannot get it to go to completion see the start of thread post.

Maybe your backup script never worked.

When the shell encounters "> $TAPEDRIVE" It will open /mavesbu/backup and connect that file to stdout. If the file did not exist, it will be created. At this point, the output is destined to go to /mavesbu/backup.

Then the shell moves along to ">> $MAILMSG". Here it will open $MAILMSG in append mode and connect stdout to that. Now the output will go to whatever file is in MAILMSG. You have overridden the effect of your earlier "> $TAPEDRIVE". (Except that if the file was created, it will continue to exist.)

Next the shell encounters 2>&1 and so stderr will now go to where ever stdout is pointing.

At this point, the shell will run the pipeline. By the time that the cpio program is invoked, it has no file descriptors pointing to /mavesbu/backup.

The command was ok until ">> $MAILMSG" which is what is screwed you up. Are you sure that the original script had that?

Go to a completely empty directory. Try this command:
date > one >> two

What do you get in one? And in two? That syntax is wrong.