Hi all.
After many suggestions to exercise the tape drive and check the logs, we
have confirmed that our problems were due to a bug in the original tar
utility. After applying the patch, tar worked. Unfortunately, our data
for the last two weeks was lost. Fortunately, vdump/vrestore worked and
we restored our machine to a working status (those must have been the
longest 3 hours of our lives).
The patch itself is somewhat misleading, it is entitled:
Patch: pax Restores Incorrect File Dates(Commands, Shells, & Utility
Patches)
As, you can see, nothing alarming, nothing to do with tar, right?
Well, wrong! As I was informed by Dr. Tom Blinn, tar, pax and cpio are
the same binary (hard links). So, a patch to one of them is a patch to
all of them. Secondly, the bug that made our backups faulty is not
evident form this line, it can be found only in the release notes for
that particular patch. Grrr! Guys, I can imagine how important it must
have been to push a *working* Service Pack, after that SP5, but please,
pay more attention to small details, like informative patch names, in
the future.
The reason why I haven't applied SP6 yet, is, well, slow comm lines and
reluctance, after SP5's "success". Also, getting a machine for a couple
of hours to apply a patch is difficult ("we have to work, can't you do
it some other time?").
So, we are running vdump, until I get a chance to patch all our
machines.
Nix.
--
"Daddy, what does <FORMATTING DRIVE C> mean?"
Received on Fri Aug 04 2000 - 05:52:52 NZST