RE: System crash during backup

Mike, We're using 7.13.UC5 Informix with 10.10 HP-UX. We have dual CPUs, but during the initial development a couple years ago, we only had single CPUs. I've never experienced a problem with the system crashing during backup, but we always use ontape -s. Are you using ontape without the -s option? I have had the I/O error occur. It normally was a bad tape or the tape drive needed to be cleaned(sometimes mutliple times). This would occur more frequently with DDS drives. Since we moved to DDS-2 drives, it is very infrequent. When the error did occur, it did not cause the system to crash. What type of tape drives are you using? Have you looked into the HP-UX Sys Admin files to determine the crash? If the system crashed, then there should be info in various logs to track why the OS crashed. From past experience, strange things occur with hardware problems on the SCSI cables and/or equipment connected to the SCSI. I would try to rule out all the hardware and OS reasons too. If the backup has been working fine and only recently began to crash during the backup, then I would question the HP-UX OS and hardware, assuming the Informix software hasn't recently changed. We ran into all sorts of problems with the system crashing when we connected a SCSI mux to our system. Did anything in the OS and/or hardware change recently? Jim > -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Hammernik [SMTP:mhammer@execpc.com] > Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 1999 9:15 PM > To: informix-list@iiug.org > Subject: System crash during backup > > We are running 7.14 Informix on a 10.10 HP box. This is a single > processor machine. Recently we had the system crash during a normal > backup. We thought the tape may have been bad the first time but it > crashed a second time with a different tape so I hesitate to say that we > had two bad tapes in a row > > The error stated Function write to tape failed: code -1 errno 5 I > know the errno five is an I/O failure but I don't know what the code > minus one means. So it may have had trouble writing a tape but why a > system crash! > > The caveat to this is that the vendor does not allow ontape -s backup > but instead forces you to use a small application program to perform the > basic functions such as status and backup. Now to top it off the vendor > says we should use tapes only two to three times because Informix has a > known bug that on a single proc system a bad tape can cause a system > crash. Is this true? > > I would have thought that I would have seen this complaint in this > newsgroup if this was truly the case. I'm more inclined to believe it's > a problem with the scripts we have to use rather than with Informix. > > Has any one else any experience with bad tapes causing system crashes/ > > Thanks in advance for your response. > > Hammer