I have an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server with Amanda 3.3.6 using an NEO200 LTO6
connected by SAS.
I ran aptitude updates yesterday evening and rebooted.
This morning, I had no email report from Amanda, and the mail admin said that the backup server and
been sending email every 10 seconds to unknown users admin1 and admin2.
After killing 5600 defunct processes from amanda trying to send email every 10 seconds overnight, I
began tracking down the causes.
First off, for some reason the reboot decided to reconfigure the /dev/sg devices, and the tape
library changed from /dev/sg10 to /dev/sg8. So, I changed the specification in amanda.conf to
/dev/tape/by-id/scsi-1IBM_3573-TL_00L2U78AN152_LL0 (which currently links to /dev/sg8). I had done
that on another backup server, because we were changing and adding hardware. I hadn't thought of
this one, because it was stable and no changes were planned. OK. Done with that.
Then, in looking for reference to admin1, I came upon the interactivity. Why would anyone ever
choose to set the default resend-delay for email to 10 seconds? That's nuts. I changed it to 0,
which means send only one email. With that out of the way, I changed the admin1 to amanda, which has
an alias including our admin group. Then I changed the check-file-delay to 1800, or 30 minutes,
which makes some kind of sense for an overnight run when admins aren't checking things all that often.
So, that pretty well wraps it up, except for one kind of important thing. I would prefer for amanda
to proceed with backups and keep them on the holding disk. If a device and/or a tape becomes
available, then proceed to put things on tape. But, do something constructive rather than just
hanging and waiting. In our case it is more likely to be morning before anyone responds anyway. I'd
rather have fallback incrementals than nothing at all. In versions of amanda before the
interactivity plugin, that is what happened.
Is this something that can be configured around?
Or does it require tweaking code by someone who knows the code and the
tradeoffs?
--
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 317 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<[email protected]>
---------------
Erdös 4
