Since I updated to 3.4.5 quite some time ago to accommodate storage definitions and an LTO7 library
alongside my LTO6 library, I have had periodic confusion brought about by the parallelism allowed in
this newer version of amanda – that is, the ability to start up a new amanda backup when the
previous one has not yet completed.
Today, my afternoon cron that runs amcheck reported no tapes available on the LTO6 (it only has one
drive). However, last night's backup had completed mid morning. When I looked at the processes, I
saw quite a few dumpers and a taper running. So, I ran an amstatus. That showed about 96 DLUs in a
state "wait for" either flushing or writing. The date for the backup indicated that it had started 5
days ago, filled both the LTO6 (administrative backups) and the LTO7 (research backups), and then
hung. When I ran an amcleanup -k, it said that there was no unprocessed log file to clean up. hmm.
Back to looking at the processes. I issued a kill on the parent of all the dumpers, looked at the
processes again, and so on until it was "cleaned up." I ended up with an email report out of that. I
tried amstatus again, and it reported that it failed to open the amdump_log file amdump.1. Then I
went back and did an amcheck again to see if that would be alright. It seemed to be. However,
looking at /usr/local/etc/amanda/daily/log/, I found that there was an amdump.2 symlink to
amdump.20180905233001 and an amdump.3 symlink to amdump.20180904233002, but, indeed, no amdump.1.
Furthermore, neither of those two files exist. The amdump files have been trimmed to October (12
through 29).
So, what's the deal here?
Why does amanda hang under those circumstances?
Why doesn't amcleanup see the older run?
If I happened to have two instances of amanda backup running (with all their subprocesses), why
wouldn't amstatus report that?
Do amstatus and amcleanup understand the parallelism and the possibility of multiple backups running
at once?
It seems they should behave a little like amflush, which will tell you what date backups are
represented in the holding space and allow you to choose what you want to flush.
And, should I delete those two hanging symlinks? Where did they come from
anyway?
--
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geosciences Departments
(*) \(*) -- 315 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<[email protected]>
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Erdös 4
