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

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2009-Mar-25 00:29:36 -0400, "Mikhail T." <mi+thun at aldan.algebra.com> wrote:
>Daniel O'Connor ???????(??):
>> People ARE helping you, just because they haven't come up with an answer is no 
>> reason to send snarky comments to the list.
>>
>No, sorry, people aren't. They are trying, yes, but not even close.

People are _trying_ to help you.  The problem is that there's no real
leads on where the problem might be so people are clutching at straws.
It's virtually impossible to debug that sort of problem remotely and
AFAIK no-one has been able to reproduce it.  I've been using dump for
decades on a variety of different systems and don't recall ever seeing
the problem you are having.

Are you restoring to an empty (freshly newfs'd) filesystem?  The '-r'
option to restore is only supposed to be used this way (though I've
ignored this in the past).

Are there any snapshots in the source filesystem?

Are you able to reproduce the problem using a different source filesystem?
(preferably something small)

Can you rule out hardware problems?

Have you tried moving the source disk to another computer and seeing
if it will dump/restore there?

Do you have enough spare space to be able to dd the problematic FS
somewhere else for experimenting?  If so, does the problem go away
if you empty all the files (so all the files are there but all are
zero-length)?  Or if you replace all the file contents with NULs?

>It is fairly obvious by now, that no real help will be forthcoming,
>for whatever reason.

Throwing a hissy-fit won't help.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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