Re: (Another) ontape to recover from a FIFO pipe

Thanks, Andy. I had been thinking of this earlier; it was nice to see it wasn't a lunatic idea. (Or if it is, it wasn't a lonely lunacy. ;-) My one big doubt is that the flat file is about 79GB in length and we all know how Informix (especially my 7.23 clunker) handles files longer than 2GB. Was your flat archive file similarly humongous? Thanks. +------------------------------------------------- Jacob Salomon -+ |When you exit this vehicle, please be sure to lower your head and| |watch your step. If you fail to do so, please lower your voice | |and watch your language. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ Andy France wrote: > > > I had a similar problem. We backup to a named pipe and gzip the dump > on the other side. For a restore I tried gzcat back to the pipe but | when I ran ontape I just got a broken pipe. > > In the end I uncompressed the dump, and specified the dump file name > in the TAPEDEV parameter in my onconfig file. ontape then did the > restore without any problems. > > HTH, > Andy. > Jacob Salomon wrote: > >> Informix IDS 7.23 (Go ahead and laugh - I agree with you) >> >> Hi Family. >> >> I have been researching ways to archive to a named pipe. I see from >> researching this newsgroup that I am far from the dfirst person to >> try this. By playing with the TAPEBLK size, I came up with 128K as >> an ideal buffer size for backups - it backed up a 140GB system in >> under 2 hours. >> >> The Unix SA created a 200GB "large file" file system while I created >> a FIFO and set TAPEDEV to reference it. I also set the TAPESIZE to a >> billion (K). All set up. >> >> I backed up by starting a DD command to read from the FIFO and write >> to a flat file. The I started the ontape -s -L 0. Like I said above, >> it was done in under 2 hours using the 128K block size. >> >> Now how about recovery? Well, I started the ontape -r in one window. >> $ ontape -r>> Please mount tape 1 on /apps/informix/arc_pipe and press Return to >> continue ... >> Before hitting enter, I ran this dd command in another window: >> $ dd if=/inf_archive/archives/archive.L0 \\ >> of=/apps/informix/arc_pipe bs=131072>> >> That is, read back from the flat file I created in the backup (79GB) >> and write it to the FIFO in the same block size with which it was >> created. >> >> On the ontape window, I hit <Return>. ontape displays the dbspaces, >> presents the ontape -d output and asks: >> Continue restore? (y/n) y >> Of course Y silly! >> >> I answer "n" to "Do you want to back up the logs?". >> >> Now it starts to churn away for a few seconds. Then POW: >> >> Physical restore failed - restore reserved pages failed Program over. >> >> Bak to the dd side, that program is patiently trying to write to the >> FIFO. I CTRL-C out of it and I get the message: >> 9+0 records in >> 8+0 records out >> >> Hey, if the reserved paged could not restore, the restore should >> have died at the first "record" from dd - at 128K it certainly >> covers the reserved pages and then some! But Noooo! It read 8 >> records of 128K each - a full meg - before deciding it couldn't >> handle the reserved pages. >> >> I cannot possibly be the first fool to stumble into this problem! >> Has anyone else ever had this problem and solved it? Is anyone out >> there successfully archiving and recovering to/from flat files using >> a FIFO pipe file? >> >> Thanks. >> +------------------------------------------------- Jacob Salomon -+