tbtape problems with OnLine & IBM RT
Several weeks ago I posted the message you'll find below. I received one follow-up post from David Kosenko (davek@informix.com) which provided a means of being able to get back at the database by changing the value of the MIRROR parameter in the tbconfig file from 0 to 1. David further suggested the problem was likely due to bad blocks on the physical device and a low level format should be performed to attempt to lock out the bad blocks. Initially I was of the opinion that bad blocks were not the problem as I was able to read the entire raw patition via the dd command without any read errors. But just to satisfy myself, I went ahead and did the low level on the device, and the problem still remains. The device is an external IBM 9332 style 200M SCSI device. I have partitions all over the drive and have NEVER had any read errors of any kind with any of the AIX (ie, regular) partitons. I've further tried shuffling the OnLine partiton to different areas on the hard disk and the problem still remains. I feel very confident at this point there are no physical problems such as bad blocks on this disk drive which would cause OnLine to barf. At this point in time I find OnLine to be utterly worthless to me. If I can't back-up my data then the product is useless to me. Is this a known bug in this release/port of OnLine? Is there a fix or update for it? Here follows the text of my original post and problem: ============================================================================== Have the following hardware, OS, and Informix . . . IBM RT AIX 2.2.1 Informix OnLine v4.00.UD4 Here's the problem . . . After initializing rootdbs and shared memory without any difficulties I use ISQL to create a couple of databases, fill one of them up with records and the other is simply empty. Now I wish to back-up this entire configuration to tape. So I use the Archive option from within tbmonitor. I then choose the option to Create, mount the tape in the drive, select "0" for a level 0 archive and then receive the following error message: Error reading from the disk, Error No. = 5. If I don't shutdown OnLine, I can still access the databases but if I do shutdown OnLine, I get the following error messages when I attempt to bring it back up: Bad Primary Chunk '/dev/rootdbs' tbinit: fatal error in shared memory initialization I'm fairly certain there's nothing wrong with the tape perameters I'm using because, oddly enough, if I only create the first database, I can back-up the system without it corrupting the rootdbs. It's only after I add the second database and attempt to back it up that it trashes rootdbs. If I make no attempts to back-up the OnLine partitions, OnLine goes up and down just fine. Has anyone run into this before? Know a fix? Could this be related to improper setting for shared memory and semaphores? If related to shared memory etc., could someone please email me either their /etc/master file or the relavent stanzas from it? Thanks. -- +--------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ | Michael Faurot | Domain: mfaurot@bogart.UUCP | | ------- ------ | UUCP: ...{irscscm|mimsy}!bogart!mfaurot | +--------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+