Re: [BackupPC-users] reactions after 1 week

[<cba...@us...>]

Wayne Scott writes:

> I am using BackupPC on my local network thanks to the new
> Debian package. Thanks Ludovic Drolez for creating the
> package.
> 
> versions:
>   backuppc  "2.0.0-3"
>   smbclient "Version 3.0.0beta2-1 for Debian"
> 
> I just wanted to share some of my experiences with this problem.
> 
> Unlike most of the traffic on this list, I am just doing my home
> machines using a low end machine for the server.   I have a 1.1Ghz Duron
> for the server.
> 
> When I started, I found that all backups always failed.  They would run
> for a while and then exit.  This is what the logs looked like:
> 
> 2003/7/8 03:09:34 full backup started for share C
> 2003/7/8 05:09:34 cleaning up after signal ALRM
> 
> The problem was that I didn't have enough memory in the server to handle
> the big perl scripts.  The machine only had 128 Megs of memory and a
> backup seems to need around 200 Megs of memory.  (The rsync method seems
> to use alot more than the others.)  Also because of a configuration
> error, I didn't have swap space enabled on that machine and the kernel
> was killing the backup processes when they got too big.

Yes, rsync works by transferring the entire file list in one
go, and it needs to be stored in memory.  The implementation
in File::RsyncP is done in C so that the memory requirements
were similar to the native rsync program.  This is a limitation
of architecture of rsync.

> After upgrading to 512 Megs of memory and enabling a big swap partition,
> the backups are working now, but they are slow.  I find that my backups
> are mostly throttled by CPU time on the server.  The rsync method is
> especally a problem.  Doing a incremental backup of a 30Gig linux
> machine using rsync took 480 minutes using rsync and only 43 minutes
> using tar.  So I am switching to tar now for my Linux machines.

That sounds very slow.  It will get faster when I add rsync checksum
caching, but your setup sounds unusually slow.

> It would be nice if the documentation gave an idea how much memory and
> CPU power is needed.  I should perhaps try disabling compression as I
> have lots of diskspace.
> 
> On the Windows boxes, I find that full backups work fine with smbclient,
> but incremental backups fail from authetication problems.
> 
> 2003/7/10 20:00:06 full backup started for share C
> 2003/7/11 00:56:12 full backup 0 complete, 26334 files, 1968225081 bytes, 237 xferErrs (4 bad files, 3 bad shares, 230 other)
> 2003/7/12 09:00:06 incr backup started back to 2003/7/10 19:00:06 for share C
> 2003/7/12 09:00:08 Got fatal error during xfer ( [-A|--authentication-file FILE] service <password>)
> 2003/7/12 09:00:19 Dump aborted (        [-A|--authentication-file FILE] service <password>)
> 
> Running smbclient from the command line seems to work fine with the
> password passed with PASSWD.
> 
> Any ideas?  It this the 3.0 smbclient problem people have been talking
> about?

It's probably related to 3.0 smbclient.  It looks like the syntax
of the command for incrementals is wrong.  Please try the entire
smbclient command (look in the XferLOG.bad file) manually and see
what is wrong.  You could then update $Conf{SmbClientIncrCmd}.

Craig