SUMMARY & Followup Question: Backup Copilot & DNS

From: Liza Weissler (liza@kestrel.rand.org)
Date: Wed Jan 27 1993 - 06:29:55 CST


Last week I reported problems with backup copilot and DNS, in that
dumpdm couldn't handle the local domain in a given host's database
directory name. Several very fast responses indicated that patch
100551-03 (Backup Copilot jumbo patch) would take care of the problem.

We obtained the patch and it did solve the problem with dumpdm and
domainized host names. Unfortunately the patch seems to have caused
us some new problems. Previously, occasionally database updates would
fail to transfer over to the database host, and messages would loop in
opermon saying (more or less) "transfer initiated...transfer
interrupted". The new version of dump appears to blast the database
update over and put it in the database directory as a batch_update.*
file. But if the update happens to be bad, rpc.dumpdbd tries to
process it and croaks, i.e.:

    1/25 13:38 rpc.dumpdbd@zobo: Started database update for level 0 dump of
        austen:/lhome/austen_c
    1/25 13:38 rpc.dumpdbd@zobo: Database update failed for level 0 dump of
        austen:/lhome/austen_c
    1/25 13:38 rpc.dumpdbd@zobo: Database startup failed
    1/25 13:38 rpc.dumpdbd@zobo: Can't perform database startup

This is incredibly annoying because the daemon dying screws up all the
other database updates. At least before when the update was bad, it
would stay on the originating system and not interfere with other
database updates!

By the way, if you trace the dump that has the old 'transfer
initiated/ transfer interrupted' problem, you see the error "RPC:
cannot encode arguments".

All in all, the database aspect of copilot is not robust enough to be
worthwhile. Does anybody know how you can just turn the stupid
database off altogether? If you comment "dumpmach" out of the config
files, dumpex core dumps.

Thanks to the respondees to my original message:

        ric@cc.uq.oz.au (Eric Halil)
        Eckhard.Rueggeberg@ts.go.dlr.de
        baumann@proton.llumc.edu (Michael Baumann)

        --- __o Liza Weissler
     ---- _`\<,_ The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
      --- (*)/ (*) liza@rand.org



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