SUMMARY: ufsdump with cron/at

From: Walter R. Moore (moorewr@eckerd.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 17 1997 - 10:03:59 CST


Usual apologies for the delay in summarizing. Here's my original question:

>Some time ago, there was a discussion on this group about problems doing
>ufsdump in cron. I would dearly love to have the summary from that
>discussion. Is this list archived somewhere? Is that in the FAQ? :)
(If
>so, just mail me an FAQ and a witty dunning letter)
>
>Why:
>I'm having a situation where I have a script which uses rsh to ufsdump
from
>a number of machines.. and it always fails when I run it from cron. Just
>stops cold and hangs forever with a bunch of processes open on the client.

>It _usually_ works when I run it with `at' instead of cron and always
works
>from the command line.
>
>Everything is Solaris 2.5.1 somewhat patched. The server is an SS20 with
a
>dual-Ross upgrade and the clients are mostly SS5s..
>
>Thanks for any help you have..

And some answers:
FAQ:
Try Looking at the Sun Managers Archive. The Web Address is
http://www.latech.edu:80/sunman.html
(Thanks to Alain Meehan - ameehan@informix.com, the first of many people to
remind me of this)

CRON v. AT
Some theories:
1) Check your environment.
I did, again. :) I don't see any rational for it working sometimes, and
hanging sometimes. I did use full paths, etc.

2) network load
I've seen high network load kill ufsdumps, and we did have hosts on an
overburdened 10base-2 network at the time - so this could cause problems in
cron or at. This looks to be the answer?

3) Use a better Backup program, such as Networker
We'll look in to this. Of course we're a college, so there's not much
funds for such things.

Summary of the summary:
Use absolute paths and make sure you know your environment.
Watch your network load
Go single-user if you can
Use a more robust backup program

Thanks to:
Alain Meehan
Frank Prado
Stephen Harris
Marc S. Gibian
Matthew Stier
Claus Assmann
Rich Kulawiec
Janet Bryant
Brett Lymn

+-------------------------------------------------------------------
        Walter R. Moore - Assistant System Administrator
        moorewr@eckerd.edu | http://www.eckerd.edu/~moorewr



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