Hi everyone - it occurred to me this morning that I never summarized the
responses I got from the great people on this list. Thanks to Joe
Fletcher, alan_at_nabeth, Wayne Sweatt, Marco Luchini, John Francini, & Dr.
Tom Blinn for responding (sorry if I forgot anyone).
John Francini's response is a good example:
>Colin,
>
>My advice is to switch to vdump. It will Do The Right Thing(tm), will
>write any amount of data to any size tape drive, will switch tapes without
>needing to know the length of the tape, will support any filesystem (not
>just UFS), will handle filesystems of arbitrarily large sizes, and just
>generally is more featureful.
>
>It also supports software compression (if the drive doesn't), multiblock
>tape checksumming, and other useful features. See
>vdump(8)/vrestore(8). Highly recommended.
Unfortunately, it seems that I don't have vdump installed on my system, and
I'm located way off-campus, so my access to Tru64 installation disks is
very limited. Thanks to Joe, Marco, & John for pointing me to where vdump
should be installed (/sbin/vdump).
For a different point of view, here is what Alan had to say:
"Dump expects to be run interactively. Always has, probably
always will. With that expectation, it tries to open /dev/tty
to prompt the operator for a tape change, when detects EOT.
Since cron based processes don't have a /dev/tty, the open
files, in the way that you see.
The usual solutions are:
1. Run dump interactively, so it has a somewhere to prompt
and there's someone to answer.
2. Run dump through expect, which may provide a /dev/tty
and have expect handle the prompts, even if only to
pass them onto an operator somehow.
3. Get better backup software.
4. Get a tape driver with higher single tape capacity. "
***********
Thanks again,
Colin
****************************************************
Colin Brooks
GIS Analyst
Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program (IHRMP)
University of California, Berkeley
Hopland Research & Extension Center (HREC)
4070 University Rd.
Hopland, CA 95449
Primary #'s (at Hopland) - TEL:(707)744-1270 FAX:(707)744-1040
Secondary # (at Berkeley) - TEL: (510)643-1136
E-mail: cbrooks_at_nature.berkeley.edu
IHRMP Homepage -
http://danr.ucop.edu/ihrmp
HREC homepage -
http://endeavor.des.ucdavis.edu/hrec
GIS homepage -
http://www.pacific.net/~cbrooks/gis1.shtml
****************************************************
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 17:47:15 NZDT