Followup: vrestore errors

From: Donald Bovee <bovee_at_amath.washington.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 09:33:47 -0700 (PDT)

On Mon, 28 Apr 1997, Donald Bovee wrote:

> Hello Managers,
>
> I have been getting an increasing number of errors when running vrestore
> of the form below:
> ---------------------------------------------
> RECORD HEADER (unknown/unexpected)
> record type : 14
> data offset : 0
> record size : 312
> flags : <none>
> ----------------------------------------------

A couple of messages back and forth with Dr. Tom Blinn helped to clarify
the situation. He suggested using the command 'vrestore -l' in order to
generate more information about the above error. Setting ACL entries on
files generated the errors. Tom checked the code for vrestore and was able
to pinpoint that directories with ACL entries were not being handled
correctly. I then took the problem to software support. It has been
'escalated' to engineering. I am waiting to hear from engineering what they
plan to do with it. I will pass on any more information to the group. By
the way, this is not the first time that Dr. Blinn has provided invaluable
support to our group. He was the only respondent to my initial request. I
hope Digital appreciates him as much as we do.

This problem does not cause data corruption per se. Piping vdump to vrestore
generates numerous errors, but the files come through OK. The situation
with a tape backup is not so good. Perhaps depending on the number of errors
generated on the way to a particular file, individual files may or may not
be recoverable. My own experience, with over 200 directories having ACL
entries set, is that interactive vrestore fails more than 50% of the time.

Workaround: What I have had to do is move all directories with ACL entries
to a separate fileset which I maintain a copy of on disk. Clearing ACL
entries ('setacl -b') does not remove the error. The directories have to
be either moved or removed.

For those of you with situations like mine, filesets larger than 2GB and
numerous ACL's set, this is a serious problem. If you have it, please let
DEC know that you need working versions of vrestore to maintain the integrity
of your system.

Thanks
Don
 
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Received on Wed May 21 1997 - 18:47:35 NZST

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