> >Yes. The partition that's having the problem is nfs mounted, however
> >amanda is calling its daemon on the remote machine to back it up (ie,
> >not thru nfs). At least that's what I'm assuming is happening.
>
> Let me make sure I've got this clear. The host you gave to Amanda has
> the "real" disk and is not getting it via NFS, right? That would be the
> correct way to do this, especially with ufsdump.
yes. amandad is called from inetd on the "slave" machine. I'm *not*
utilizing nfs for the backups.
> That's a problem. You should give ufsdump (via Amanda) disk names (e.g.
> /dev/rdsk/xxx) or mount points, never a subdirectory and certainly never
> a symlink.
I *am* using a subdirectory of the mount point, but definitely not a
symlink. My mount point is /export but disklist has /export/data. I
can change it to the parent mount point, but can you think of any
reason why this would all of a sudden stop working?
In short this is what happened. A week after I started working here,
our mail machine's hard drive died. I had never configured or
restored from backups by amanda before, but the previous sysadmin had
everything pretty tidy so I figured it out. A couple days ago I had
some mail get lost by certain users so I went digging to find it for
them. Unfortunately, after going through about 7 weeks of tapes, the
last backup of that directory I found was, guess what, the one that I
restored from that crash right after I started.
So I was thinking "why hasn't *one* directory been backed up in all
this time?" I had to completely rebuild the mail machine, but that's
simple.. it's just a vanilla Solaris 7 install with some sendmail
updates.
> Ufsdump needs to convert whatever name you give it to a disk
> because that's what it reads directly, and it does that via /etc/vfstab.
> Since that name (symlink) is not mentioned there, I suspect it pretty
> much just gave up.
>
> Also, any dump program you give a symlink to is more than likely only
> going to back up the symlink itself, not what it points to.
yeah, that makes sense. I'm not using the symlink.
oh, another tidbit of info. Like I said, my mount point on that slave
machine is /export, but I've got /export/data in my disklist file.
Under that directory exists ftp and mail. On all the tapes that I
went through for the past 7 weeks, every file under /export/data/ftp
was intact, subdirectories and all. Why did it single out
/export/data/mail/folders to deny? Pure Murphy's Law? (which, I'm
fully willing to believe at this point....)
thanks, John, for your sage advice. I'm very appreciative of people
that voluntarily respond to 100's of emails a week on stuff like
this...
-drew
