BackUps
From MyLinuxNotes
I have been using afbackup for sometime and it has been very good to me. It can be a little confusing though.
- When connecting with the client you have to provide the -k switch with your cryptkey or it wont work.
- When restoring a file make sure you leave off the leading / or you'll get an error:
afrestore -v path/to/files/i/want/
Errors
Here is the error I got from my backup system:
The device /dev/nst0 on host muffin is not ready for use. You are requested to check the device for possible errors and to correct them.
Best regards from your backup service.
This was after an upgrade in which the ownership of /dev/nst0 got changed. This did the trick for me:
chown backup.backup /dev/nst0
Another error that I have been getting via email says something along the lines of:
...another process has a hold on the backup system...
I am not quite sure why this is happening yet, but to get the system back up here is what I have done.
- kill the process on the client machine referenced in the email
- kill the sever process
- Then look for any stray afbackup processes on the client with
ps aux | grep backupand kill them - Restart the server:
/etc/init.d/xinetd restart
In another instance my backups kept failing with errors in the log like:
Tue May 1 20:00:01 2007, Warning: Cannot read file `/var/lib/afbackup/n um', switching to full backup. Tue May 1 20:00:01 2007, Starting full backup. Tue May 1 20:45:17 2007, Error: Backup client side did not receive nece ssary starting information from server. Output was: Tue May 1 20:45:17 2007, Streamer state: BUSY Server-ID: 10.73.86.5:/etc/afbackup/server.conf Precious tapes: 1-2
I tried killing orphaned processes and restarting the server, but the problem persisted. Finally I found the answer and again the perms were changed on /dev/nst0. I also had to use cartis:
# cartis 1 # cartis -i 1 1
This tells the server that I want to start at the beginning of tape 1. I know I am overwriting previous backups, but it's better than nothing.
