I posted a query to the list a few weeks ago asking if anyone else had seen problems with offline catalog backups taking excessive amounts of time a Sun T2000 running Solaris 10 and with NetBackup 6.0MP4. Several people e-mailed me informing me that Veritas recommends using the hot catalog backup functionality instead of offline catalog backups, which I already knew and which was completely unhelpful as I was concerned about why an offline catalog backup that used to take about an hour and 15 minutes was now taking over five hours without any increase in the size of the catalog. Ignoring this sort of drastic change in a system's behavior is incredibly bad practice and I wanted to get to the bottom of this and not just assume that because I could run hot catalog backups that everything was going to be OK. I did get one very helpful e-mail from Don Klebba who had had a similar problem. Don found that disabling TCP fusion and changing some of his TCP parameters with ndd fixed the problem. Armed with the information that Don gave me (Thanks Don!) I found the following Symantec tech note. http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/284421.htm which explains the TCP fusion bug and how to fix it; you can either install the latest Sun patch bundle, which also fixes the T2000's problem with crashing when jumbo frames are enabled on the network interfaces, or disable TCP fusion with mdb and then edit your /etc/system file so that on the next reboot your system will no longer be using TCP fusion. If it hadn't been for Don's e-mail I wouldn't have found this because the tech note is about catalog backups failing with type 11 (a system call failed) errors. My catalog backups weren't failing, they had just become incredibly slow. I was able to take the downtime to install the patch bundle and my offline catalog backups went back to taking an hour and 15 minutes. Again I'd like to say thanks to Don Klebba and point out that when this sort of thing happens it's a good idea to figure out why it's happening and not just assume that because you have an alternative solution (in this case hot catalog backups) that things are going to be OK. I've seen some system administrators get bitten because they made that sort of assumption and end up having their careers suddenly interrupted with an RGE (resume generating event).
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