support quality (Re: dump | restore fails: unknown tape headertype 1853384566)

[Jack L. Stone]

At 09:45 AM 3.25.2009 -0500, Peggy Wilkins wrote:
>>>>>>  Jack L Stone <jacks at sage-american.com> writes:
>
>    >> I've been watching this thread with some interest since we've had some
>    >> similar problems with dump/restore which we use every morning via cron
>    >> scripts on a number of servers to produce bootable clones as part
of our
>    >> backup program. Have been doing this for years and also never saw a
problem
>    >> as most of you say. We prefer dump/restore for backups.
>
>    >> However, last month upon upon upgrading those servers from FBSD-6.3px
>    >> (RELEASE) to 7.0px (RELEASE) we found that about one-half of the
servers
>    >> had a similar problem as the original poster while the other half
did not.
>    >> All of the servers (rackmounts) use the same (type) hardware. We
spent many
>    >> hours trying to solve the problem with those that failed to
dump/restore.
>    >> Also, searched for any others with the problem and only found a
very few,
>    >> but without solutions to this issue. (Indeed, the only one was a
reference
>    >> to any efforts to restore an older OS version which didn't apply
here).
>  [snip]
>    >> SOLUTION
>    >> The "clones" are a very important pasrt of our backup program.
Since the
>    >> dump side of the problems simply stuck and provided no error
message at all
>    >> and the errors from any restores were not useful, our only solution
was to
>    >> revert back to FBSD-6.3 on those servers with this issue and
dump/restore
>    >> went back to working again. We left those that were working on
FBSD-7.0-R
>    >> and they continue to work okay.
>
>I was seeing this same problem on all my 64-bit systems: FreeBSD-7
>dump would hang at a random point.  Dump continues to work flawlessly
>for me on FreeBSD-7/i386.
>
>I ran across this which includes a patch:
>
>http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=121684
>
>The kernel patch linked to there solved the problem for me, but I am
>running many production systems and am unwilling to apply this patch
>to -RELEASE every time there is a kernel update (I just use the
>standard GENERIC kernel which I get via freebsd-update).  I now live
>without dump on amd64.  Apparently this fix is waiting on some related
>issue; and I will be very happy when it makes it to the officially
>released kernel.
>
>plw
>

Thanks for the reply. Forgot to mention, our machines are all i386 with the
problem -- so are the ones without the problem.

Yes, I found that patch too and tried it on one of the servers -- no joy.

Guess we'll continue to wait also for now. Maybe 7.2/i386....or, until
someone finds the solution since we're out of ideas and stuck with 6.3 in
order to use dump that we have trusted.

Jack

(^_^)
Happy trails,
Jack L. Stone

System Admin
Sage-american