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

[Peggy Wilkins]

>>>>>  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