Hi there,
On Thu, 20 Jul 2023, David Raison wrote:
On 19/07/2023 13:25, David Raison wrote:
I guess I'll try to pipe the process' output to files so that I may
be able to spot when and/or where exactly the switch from listing
to dumping happens ...
... where it started dumping content during that first run ...
...
I tried excluding the entire directory to see if the problem still
occurred, this time on a different location perhaps, and it did, so
it's not any specific file in that directory.
The second time, it started acting up here ...
...
So I don't know where to head on from here.
I've been watching this thread, but I haven't chimed in because I've
had no experience like yours so I can't offer you any particular gold
nugget. But I know that if that were my system I'd be able to fix it
so here's how I'd go about it. In the absence of some of the detail,
in places I'm going to have make some assumptions.
I think there are four possibilities, I'd attack them in this order:
1. A hardware problem.
2. Something caused entirely by the BackupPC config.
3. Something caused entirely by the machine being backed up.
4. Something caused by a combination of 2 and 3 above, which we can
probably leave for now. We might just have to come back to it.
The main assumption I'm making is that all these boxes are on the same
Ethernet LAN, and they're using the same switches and cabling, and you
either have great confidence in the network itself or you have already
tried swapping the cables, switches, ports, etc. with no effect so you
know that the network hardware is beyond suspicion.
Firstly, if this is a hardware box and not a VM, it could be as simple
as a broken electronic component. To find that component might not be
perfectly straightforward but it's very straightforward to replace the
hardware in its entirety. If you do that and the problem goes away it
points strongly to the hardware being the issue. In that case I'd be
looking at disecting into the major parts: PSU, RAM, motherboard, CPU
and mass storage devices, in more or less that order. If the network
device is something like a plug-in card that can be high on the list,
if for no other reason than that it's easy to swap. (As far as I'm
concerned, dodgy firmware in interface cards comes under the heading
of hardware problems.)
Secondly, you've said that you have some number of other boxes being
backed up which aren't giving this kind of trouble. The configuration
of the backup software can be *very* different for the different boxes
to be backed up, and I'd want to check that I had at least one other
box with exactly the same BackupPC configuration apart obviously from
the IP address. I'd also want to have the backups running by means of
an automatic schedule rather than starting them from the command line.
Thirdly, I'd want to check that the supporting utilities and operating
system are exactly the same on the box that's giving trouble and again
at least one that isn't. Particularly things like the versions of the
utilities which transfer the data - e.g. rsync, ssh, inetd, whatever -
and that these things are also configured in the same way, for example
you might have rsync running as a daemon on one box but running from a
super-server like xinetd on another. You might not even have the same
user running the remote utilities, so permissions might come into play.
All this might be a tall order; you might be reduced to running md5sum
on files and doing directory listings all over the place, which is one
reason it's last in this checklist.
When the checklist is exhausted we'll know a lot more.
--
73,
Ged.
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