Re: tbtape -s on SCO Unix 3.2.5.0

"Bryan Johnson" <bjohnson@mail.tir.com> wrote: :I am currently working on a upgrade for a system from Informix 4.0 to :Informix 5.x. Within the crontab entry the tbtape -s is running :redirecting standard input to the command to make it automated. :This is working fine 80% of the time. The problem comes in when the :process recieves an initial error with the tape device unable to be opened. : After this the process starts to ask which level of archive to run, but :instead of waiting for a response from the file it gets caught in a loop :and creates a file in /tmp until the root file system fills. At this :point the SCO will crash and not come back up. :My question is can anyone tell me is there a better way (or any other) to :make tbtape runing a level 0 archive of the system? If it errors out and :aborts due to tape errors that is fine to. We just need to make this so :it will not crash the entire system. Isn't this in the FAQ? The essential part of my command to run ontape looks like this: echo ''n' ' /usr/info71on/bin/ontape -s -L 0 ' head -100 in a shellscript run by cron. I got this from a posting here a long time ago. Thanks to whoever posted it. It should also work with tbtape. The only real way I have found of checking that the backup has been successfull is to check the online log file and see that there are entries for both starting and successfull finish of the backup. Currently we simply print out the last part of the log and have some responsible user check it. That has the extra benefit that the logfile gets regularly checked for other potential problems. Although the users may not understand much of the log, they do learn quite fast what it should look like, and report any descripancy to their support contact. (We don't have onsite DBA's.) There are some tools that may help you to automatize this. Isn't it incredible that Informix haven't over all these years fixed tbtape and ontape to be easily runable from cron? I am amazed. (Or was that the wrong word :-) Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company