Procedure for doing a dump (revised $Date: 92/06/05 13:11:17 $). Right now the dumping procedure is kind of labor intensive. Finding a tape: A level 0 (weekly) dump will take about 2 tapes (4 tapes using the old Exabyte 8200's). A single tape can hold about a week's worth of level 1 (daily) dumps. Tapes are stored in 608-2 Evans. Some are in the tape holder on the wall, more are in the file cabinet. Here is the method for reusing tapes. Daily dumps can be reused if there have been two weekly dumps done since they were created, although you'll want to save them as long as possible. That way we don't lose anything should a single weekly dump be unreadable. Weekly dumps are saved for a month, and every sixth weekly dump set is saved forever. After that weekly dump tapes can be reused as well. A database of what tapes were used for and when is kept in /sprite/admin/dump/dumpdates. The tapes in the tape holder are stored in chronological order left-to-right, like a circular buffer. Weekly dump tapes have rubberbands around them. The most current weekly dump has a paperclip in the rubberband. Older tapes are kept in the filing cabinet. The boxes marked "reuse" are ok for using. Boxes marked "weekly" are for weekly dump tapes. The box marked "bad" contains defective tapes that can be given away. When you clean out a slot in the tape holder put the daily dump tapes in a reuse box. If you are cleaning out the upper left slot the weekly tapes go into a weekly box. For any other slot the weekly tapes go into a reuse box. We should probably put tapes into one box and get them to use from another so that tapes don't get overwritten right away. Finding a drive: There are currently two drives being used for backups. To avoid problems with server crashes, they are generally hooked up to a client machine, often the home machine of the person doing the dumps. If you move the drives, you must edit the crontab of the new and old hosts so that the right machine does the daily dumps (see "Daily dumps" below). The drives are named /dev/rst04.nr and /dev/rst05.nr. Putting the tape in the drive: Push the button on the exabyte. After about 30 seconds the door will open. Make sure the red write-protect slider on the tape is not visible. Put in the new tape and close the door. Wait about 30 seconds and the green light will go on. Now you're ready to go. While the tape is being accessed the red light will flicker. Initializing a tape: Once you have found a tape you need to initialize it. Notes: you must wait until the green light goes on before initializing. You must be root to do the initialization. a) Initializing a blank tape If it is a blank tape use the command "dump -i -f ". (See "Finding a drive" above for the list of device names.) The next tape number can be determined from the dumpdates file. In the long run, you can just look for the last "Initializing" line. For the time being, though, you should verify that there aren't any "Initializing" lines with a higher tape number than the one you plan to use. b) Initializing an old tape If you're reusing a tape use "dump -r -f ". Make sure the device you use is a "norewind" tape device. Daily dumps: Daily dumps are done via the script /sprite/admin.$MACHINE/dailydump. This script is run every night by cron. It will send mail to "dumper" when it completes or if there are errors. If the machine doing the dumps crashes while the dumps are in progress, "dumper" will get mail with an error message when it reboots. If this happens, you will need to start a new tape. This is because the dump program gets confused by the partial file at the end of the tape, at least when used with an 8500 tape drive. You can also check /sprite/admin/dump/dumplog for error messages. You can use /sprite/admin.$MACHINE/dumpsize to get an idea when the daily tape is about to fill up. If you take over as dumper during the middle of the week, you should edit /sprite/admin/dump/dumpalias by hand (so that it names you instead of the old dumper). If your first job as dumper is to run the weekly dumps, the weekly dump script will change the dumpalias file for you. Weekly dumps: 1. Log in as yourself to the machine with the drives, su to root, and run "/sprite/admin.$MACHINE/weeklydump -i". This will initialize the tape in the drive and start the dumps. This will disable the daily dumps by creating a lockfile "/sprite/admin/dump/doingweekly". This will also change the dumper alias to your userid. You should either run it from the console or run it with stdout and stderr redirected to a file or /dev/null. If you run it from, e.g., an rlogin shell without redirecting the output, the dump will abort when you log out. If something goes wrong with the weekly dump and you want to start over again, you will need to run "weeklydump startFs" where startFs is the first file system that you wish to start dumping. Otherwise, it will start dumping from the file system after the last successfully dumped file system. 2. When the tape on one drive fills up, the dumps will automatically resume using the next drive in the tape list (see /sprite/admin/dump/tapelist). If the dumps exhaust the list of tapes, the weeklydump script will send mail to "dumper", saying that the dumps need attention and giving the name of the next filesystem that needs to be dumped. (Alternatively, you can look in the dumplog or dumpdates files to see which filesystem couldn't be dumped.) With the old 8200's it took 10-12 hours to write the first two tapes. With the 8500's it takes about 15 hours to do the complete dumps (on two tapes). If the drives do run out, replace the tapes with new ones. Rerun "weeklydump -i". It will look in the lock file to determine the next directory to dump and resume dumping. As with the daily dumps, "dumper" will get mail in case of errors, crashes, or completion of the dumps. 3. One the dumps are complete, label the tapes (with the date and what filesystems they contain). Put another tape in the first drive (the one listed first in /sprite/admin/dump/tapelist) and reenable the daily dumps with "dailydump -i". Cleaning a tape drive: The tape drives should be cleaned once a quarter, using the drive cleaning kits in the filing cabinet in 608-2. Each kit is good for three cleanings. When you start a new kit, mark both the cartridge and the bottle with the drive that you are cleaning them with. Also write down the date of the cleaning on the cartridge. When reusing a kit, use the cartridge and bottle that are labeled for the drive you want to clean. (And of course write down the date on the cartridge.) Specific instructions on how to use the kit are in with the cartridge. Tape errors: Occasionally the dumps will fail due to some problem with the tape drive. There should be a syslog message from the tape driver which contains some magic numbers detailing the failure. To look up the meaning of the numbers, check out Appendices C and D of the Exabyte 8500 User's Manual. The "sense code" and "qualifier" in the syslog message correspond to the ASC and ASCQ numbers in Appendix C. Unfortunately, you have to guess what the Sense Key was. The "symptom code" in the syslog message corresponds to the FSC numbers in Appendix D. Other documentation: You may also wish to read the man pages for the following programs and scripts: dump, dailydump, weeklydump.