[BackupPC-users] RE: tarExtract: Unexpected end of tar archive

[Sandeep C. <sa...@ne...>]

I just did following files /var/state which primarily has just one =
treemenu.cache file and one directory linuxconf. It backed them up OK =
but still came up with error summary. I tried running same command with =
tee'ing output to |tar tvf - on shell with backuppc user and it ran with =
no problems. There definitely is something else...=20

Same thing is happening if I backup ['/etc','/var'] summary comes up =
saying 2 errors but otherwise it backups up everything nicely(that's =
what looks like from restore menu)


Here is the XferLOG:

Running: /usr/bin/ssh -q -n -l root timdo1.amsnet.com /bin/tar -c -v -i =
-b20 -f - -C / --totals --exclude=3D./temp ./var/state


./var/state/
./var/state/linuxconf/
./var/state/linuxconf/treemenu.cache
Total bytes written: 10240 (10kB, 4.1MB/s)
tarExtract: Unexpected end of tar archive (tot =3D 4351, num =3D 2560, =
posn =3D )
tarExtract: Unexpected end of tar archive during read
tarExtract: Done: 2 errors, 2 filesExist, 48 sizeExist, 60 =
sizeExistComp, 2 filesTotal, 48 sizeTotal


hmmm.


-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Barratt [mailto:cr...@at...]
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 12:53 PM
To: Sandeep Chadha
Cc: bac...@li...
Subject: Re: tarExtract: Unexpected end of tar archive=20


> After some research I figured out what the problem was. These files
> where it spits this error had only read and write permissions for =
root,
> of course backuppc runs as a user backuppc so its not allowed to read
> those files. Now is there a workaround to backup these type of files
> which have exclusive rw------- for root.

Ok.  But I would still like to understand why BackupPC_tarExtract
exits with the indicated error.  This probably means tar itself
(which is reading the files and generating the tar archive) is
exiting; shouldn't tar just print an error about not being able
to read the file and continue?  Or maybe tar's error messages are
getting mixed up in the archive output (the archive is meant to go
to stdout and all other output to stderr)...

Anyhow, one solution to your permissions problem is to use ssh to
elevate the client process owner to root, which will still work
even on the same machine.  See the manual for more info.

Craig