Ok, better get the popcorn out, this is a big one.
First: the system:
Compaq Alpha ES40 running TRU64 v. 4.0F
Gigabit cards:DEGPSA
Gigabit Switch:Compaq 5411
Now for the problem:
Last night I started a vdump to a remote tape drive (with the command: vdump -0 -u -f - /<filesystem> | rsh <remote server> dd of=<tape_device>), everything looked like it was working fine, so I went home (big mistake). this morning I come in and check on the status of my backup, and it was at 13% complete!! (after running for about 14 hours, and the data is only 27 Gigs). So I killed the job and did some investigating. Our systems have multiple network cards (each with their own IP address), regular 10/100 cards and Gigabit cards going to a Gigabit switch. I started the vdump again, and looked at the network activity on all the cards, and I noticed that one of the 10/100 cards was being VERY used, while neither of the gigabit cards were being used much at all. So I killed the job again, and the network activity on the 10/100 card went back to normal. So I figured out how to to the remote vdump from the gigabit card on the local machine, into the gigabit card on the remote machine (just a different IP address), and started the job again. This time when I monitored the network activity the gigabit card on both systems was very active, but the numbers didn't seem to be too high. In fact, in 6 minutes the vdump only did .1% (point one percent) of the 27 gigs!! So then I figured it was the way the Gigaswitch was configured, and sure enough, I noticed that it was set to autonegotiate (which I have heard dramatically slows down throughput, and is unnecessary being the ports only support gigabit speeds), so I turned off autonegotiation on the gigaports on the switch (config port 1 auto off duplex full), and also on the gigabit card on both servers (lan_config -ialt1 -a0). You know what happened? None of the IP addresses on the network cards could be PINGed. The 10/100 cards or the gigabit cards. I find this very odd indeed. Why does autonegotiation of one card effect the availability of a completely different card (that doesn't even go through the dang gigaswitch!?).
So I switch everything back to how it was, but I really need to backup that data. If anyone has any clue about any of this, please PLEASE email me. Thanks in advance. And if you read all this gobbly-gook and have no idea, thanks for at least reading this far into it. ;-)
Plenty of further information available upon request.
Jonathan Williams
Received on Thu Jan 11 2001 - 16:50:06 NZDT