From: Dan P. <da...@in...> - 2007-01-23 22:39:14
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Hi all, I recently had a problem with backuppc's EMailNotifyMinDays parameter. running 2.1.2p1 (will upgrade to 2.1.3, but from skimming changelogs this has not been addressed). I have a hosts file that looks something like this: foo 0 root bar 0 root arf 0 root baz 0 root and i've got the following in config.pl: $Conf{EMailAdminUserName} = 'ro...@in...'; $Conf{EMailUserDestDomain} = '@internet2.edu'; And, I had: $Conf{EMailNotifyMinDays} = 2.5; Things were going swimmingly. One day, my disk reached 95% full (default for DfMaxUsagePct). It is possible i missed an email from backuppc notifying me of this. It's not possible that I missed a bunch of them, though. Every 3 days or so, I woudl receive an email from backuppc complaining that backups had failed for the first alphabetically-sorted host name in my hosts file (ie, in the example above, "arf"). As it turns out this is an oddball host, so i figured something weird was broken, and one that wasn't a high priority, so i didn't get around to fixing it. Unfortunately, the emailnotifymindays paramter prevented backuppc from telling me anything else (such as that all of my other hosts were failing backups, or that the disk was full, etc). Luckily I figured this out during routine testing and didn't miss too many days' worth of backups (about 2 weeks as it turned out). Setting emailnotifymindays to 0 causes all the emails to come through. At the very least 0 should be the default and a comment should fully explain the ramifications. Better would be to have this never apply to system-wide administrative e-mails, and to have it apply to each host individually rather than to all hosts that a given user is reponsible for. thanks, danno -- Dan Pritts, System Administrator Internet2 office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224 |
From: Craig B. <cba...@us...> - 2007-01-24 08:27:35
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Dan writes: > I recently had a problem with backuppc's EMailNotifyMinDays > parameter. >=20 > running 2.1.2p1 (will upgrade to 2.1.3, but from skimming changelogs > this has not been addressed). Right - no changes in this area. > Every 3 days or so, I woudl receive an email from backuppc > complaining that backups had failed for the first alphabetically-sorted= > host name in my hosts file (ie, in the example above, "arf"). =20 >=20 > As it turns out this is an oddball host, so i figured something weird > was broken, and one that wasn't a high priority, so i didn't get around= > to fixing it. >=20 > Unfortunately, the emailnotifymindays paramter prevented backuppc from > telling me anything else (such as that all of my other hosts were faili= ng > backups, or that the disk was full, etc). >=20 > Luckily I figured this out during routine testing and didn't miss too > many days' worth of backups (about 2 weeks as it turned out). >=20 > Setting emailnotifymindays to 0 causes all the emails to come through. >=20 > At the very least 0 should be the default and a comment should fully > explain the ramifications. >=20 > Better would be to have this never apply to system-wide administrative > e-mails, and to have it apply to each host individually rather than > to all hosts that a given user is reponsible for. This is strange. The code should send admin messages without caring about the value of $Conf{EMailNotifyMinDays}. You should get one every night if something needs attention. The cache of email sending times to users is only for per-host messages, not admin messages. So there must be some other reason the admin emails were not sent or delivered. Your address setting looks correct and you know that per-host user messages work to that same address. To debug, copy and edit the script to exit after it sends the admin email, and change the logic so it always sends it. I agree $Conf{EMailNotifyMinDays} could/should apply per host, rather than per user. I'll add that to the feature request list. Craig |
From: Dan P. <da...@in...> - 2007-01-25 17:27:20
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On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 12:27:20AM -0800, Craig Barratt wrote: > This is strange. The code should send admin messages without > caring about the value of $Conf{EMailNotifyMinDays}. You should > get one every night if something needs attention. The cache of > email sending times to users is only for per-host messages, not > admin messages. I went back and looked through my old mail. I was wrong - the nightly e-mails were in fact sent. However, the nightly e-mails were wrong/incomplete/misleading. I guess this falls under a feature request. Here's one: The following hosts had an error that is probably caused by a misconfiguration. Please fix these hosts: - armstrong.internet2.edu (Child exited prematurely) The following directories are bogus and are not being used by BackupPC. This typically happens when PCs are removed from the backup list. If you don't need any old backups from these PCs you should remove these directories. If there are machines on this list that should be backed up then there is a problem with the hosts file: - /backuppc/data/pc/branford.internet2.edu - /backuppc/data/pc/cvs0.internet2.edu - /backuppc/data/pc/nmsx.internet2.edu - /backuppc/data/pc/wlan-reg.internet2.edu The "bogus directories" were real, i had chosen not to clean them out (i'm sure i could have left them configured but set their expiration to infinite, the real problem here is that there were no backups attempted of all the other hosts at all, and the nightly admin email does not reflect these. it is assumed that the per-host emails are the notification mechanism. Ideally, the nightly admin email would have an option to list any hosts that have not had recent backups (by whatever definition is used by the per-user email), along with the owners listed in the hosts file. I realize that you originally wrote this software for backing up PCs that might not be used regularly and this could come up with lots of noise from people who were out of the office. On the other hand, I (and I bet lots of others) use it for servers that are up and shoudl be backed up every night. this is overlap with the per-host notifications. But I think it is a useful feature; in my case, i might want to set the owner of a server to be a developer who gets the nag emails, but i might want the backup administrator to get all the failure notifications as well, in one convenient e-mail. Ideally you might be able to list in the hosts file some configuration for this. ie, don't notify me for some hosts on saturdays and sundays. But i'd be happy with a single option to turn such a list on or off. thanks for considering this. danno |
From: Craig B. <cba...@us...> - 2007-01-29 07:01:24
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Dan writes: > I was wrong - the nightly e-mails were in fact sent. >=20 > However, the nightly e-mails were wrong/incomplete/misleading. > I guess this falls under a feature request. It's a bug. Missed backups due to the disk being too full are never included in the admin nightly email. Thanks for pointing it out. I fixed it in 3.0.0, but the bug exists in 2.1.x too. If you want to fix it in 2.1.x, change this line in bin/BacupPC_sendEmail= from: my $reply =3D $bpc->ServerMesg("status hosts"); to my $reply =3D $bpc->ServerMesg("status hosts info"); Craig |