Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula and burning DVD's

[Tracy R R. <tr...@co...>]

Arno Lehmann wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 27.10.2005 12:03, Tracy R Reed wrote:
> 
> has this been answerded already?

Yes, I have since resolved a lot of these issues either on my own or
with help from Kern.

>>I just labelled a second volume and it did not give me that erorr this
>>time. Not sure what the difference would be. Maybe the first media was
>>bad or something.
> 
> 
> Well, that message is the output of the system's mount command, I assume.

I don't recall how I remedied this but it no longer gives me this eror.

> Right, this is indeed sort of a problem - as long as Bacula allows IDs 
> and names you should avoid using names consisting of digits only.

Hmm...Ok. I guess I will go with Vol0001 or something like that like
bacula seems to do by default from now on.

> Ever tried entering "." without qoutes at a prompt? But in fact bconsole 
> doesn't like C-z or c-c. Well, I can live without it, because I usually 
> can leave the bconsole properly.

Yes, I eventually figured the '.' out. Not having ctrl-z is quite
annoying though. I am just in the habit of using it so often for other
text based apps that I forget bconsole doesn't like it. I don't
understand how it can not support ctrl-z anyhow. I thought that sort of
'came free' with unix apps. All of the C apps I've written in the past
handle it just fine.

> No, but keep in mind that the compression is done by the FD and that 
> gzip can use lots of CPU time, depending on the compression setting, the 
> data to compress, and of course the machine it's running on.

This and the 1.3T backup size estimate happened because I was spooling
to disk and accidentally included the spool directory in the backup set
since it was on the same fs. Oops. :) It now spools to its very own
logical volume so this is no longer a problem.

 >>Also, is there any way to see what files it is backing up in real time?
> 
> You can query the FD, but this only gives a snapshot of what it's doing. 
>   Try the status client=xxx-fd command.

I figured this out also. Plus I now sometimes use the tray console.

>>Error trying to open /dev/hda exclusively ... retrying in 1 second.
>>Error trying to open /dev/hda exclusively ... retrying in 1 second.
>>Trying to open without locking.
>>FATAL: /dev/hda already carries isofs!
>>
>>
>>27-Oct 02:59 home-sd: Marking Volume "22" in Error in Catalog.
>>
>>Overall I am getting very weird and inconsistant behavior. :(
>>
> 
> 
> Yes, that's what happens sometimes when you use beta software :-)

The above "Error trying to open..." occurred because Gnome tries to be
smart and automatically mount inserted media etc. so as soon as the DVD
tray closed it would jump in and try to mount it at the same time baculs
tried to access it. I had to turn off that feature in gnome. Not sure
this is documented anywhere with bacula yet.

> To help improving the DVD writing code, you should try to understand the 
> reactions of your system to the commands involved. Bacula relies on 
> external programs, currently simple scripts, to do the actual work of 
> writing to DVD. You can run these scripts fromthe shell, and you can 
> read them and try the commands by hand.

Yep. I have done some of this and learned some interesting things.

Another odd problem I ran into is that growisofs does not like to be run
under sudo. In fact it completely aborts. This is a real hassle because
I generally use only sudo and never log in directly as root. I generally
don't even have a root password configured (Ubuntu style, although I am
running Fedora). But I had to set one and use su because of this. Not
bacula's fault, just writing it to get this into the archives in case
someone else runs into it.

Thanks!

-- 
Tracy R Reed
http://copilotconsulting.com