Re: Unattended online archival

Pragnesh Sampat (psampat@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu) wrote: : Hi, I would like some information on the best way to set up unattended : (through cron) Informix database achival. : I am running Informix OnLine 5.01 on a Sparc 1000 running Solaris 2.3. My : dbspaces are on raw disks. : I would like to setup nightly archival of my databases through cron. I know : that Informix manual suggests that "tbtape" is an interactive program and : should not be run in background mode. Here is what I have done, : (this is a simplified version) : ******************************************************************* : mt -f /dev/rmt/0 stat : if [ $? != 0 ] : echo "Error!!!!!!!" : exit : fi : tbtape -s << END >> ${LOG} 2>&1 : ^M # "RETURN" for tape ready : 0 # level 0 : END : ******************************************************************* I do it the same way and erverything works fine on more than 10 machines. : There are two problems with this : 1> tbtape keeps on writing ^M into my log file and thus my log file becomes : unreadable Why don't you call this script with directing stdout and stderr to an appropiate LOGfile. So you get all messages of your script in this log. : 2> Inspite of checking status of tape drive with "mt" command tbtape : encounters a strange error (Error 16 - mount busy) and goes into an : end less loop of writing error message into the log file, eventually : filling up my file system and creating a lot of problems. I have had the same problem on my machine and it was a hard job to find the problem. Are you sure that no other cronjob tries to write to tape. In my case this was the reason. Exactly at the same time there were 2 processes started from cron, trying to write to tape. : So the question is whether I should fix my script or should I be using : some different backup scheme all together (like tbunload or dbexport)? I hope I have helped you Dirch -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dirch Scheer email: scheer@stadt-mh.de | | Amt 10-3 Tel. : +49 208 455 1006 | | Stadtverwaltung (snail-)Mail : Ruhrstr. 32 | | Muelheim an der Ruhr D-45468 Muelheim an der Ruhr | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Inspiration gave them the motivation to move on out their isolation | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+