Sorry, I haven't contributed much to the list for a while.

One of my offsite VPN client machines was moved to a slower
internet link.  Meanwhile, in October it went through a major
automated upgrade.  As a result, the nightly rsync job took
longer than 24 hours.  The next night's backup started before
the first completed, which attempted to move all those files
again, and slowed the link down further.  Cascading failures.
I was incredibly busy, so I turned off dirvish to that machine
rather than fix the problem.

Bad mistake.

That offsite machine lost a RAM, which caused it to do a lot
of extra activity, and heat up and toast the disk.  A week
ago, it lost the disk - with no recent backups.  Bad result.

Well, the machine is repaired now, and will work temporarily
until I replace it (currently a Shuttle ST62K mini-ITX, not
so good) with something lower power and more reliable (probably
a Via C7 or Intel Atom mini-ITX ).  We can talk about low power
computers off the list ( My new firewall will be a PC Engines
ALIX, using an AMD Geode with built-in encryption engine for
OpenVPN, all for 4 watts!).  But I digress ...

In any case, I fixed the dirvish pre-client script so this 
won't happen again.  I hope.  Whenever that client is running
rsync, it will be slow, so I want to skip that night's dirvish
run.  I added this to the end of the pre-client bash script:

---------------------------------------------------------------
...
if ps -C rsync > /dev/null
then
   echo "rsync is already running"
   exit 1
else
   exit 0
fi
---------------------------------------------------------------

The ps command returns 0 if the client is already running rsync,
which causes the first if clause to execute; the pre-client 
script exits with an error.  Dirvish notices this, and skips
the rsync command and postclient script, and moves on to the
next client.  Otherwise, the ps returns a 1 (no rsync found)
and the pre-client script exits with a 0 - no error.  I will
move the repaired client machine back to its home, and hope
that this prevents the cascading dirvish error.  If some of
the backups take more than 24 hours, well, that is better
than no backups at all.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [EMAIL PROTECTED]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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