Re: 2 bugs from Billy on hdup

[On 21 Mar, @ 23:29, Billy wrote in "[hdup-user] 2 bugs from Billy  ..."]
> Well, so far, I had a few problems here.  I narrowed it down to some 
> bugs in the code for one, and I'm not sure about the other.
> 
> First, when I used the "exclude =" line in the global section, I needed 
> to empty that in some of my host sections.  But I found out the hard way 
> that this causes the backup to miss a lot of files!

well, it does say that in the manual page. Everything you say in the 
global section is inherited by the other hosts. But I'm not sure
the 'exclude =' works as intended. Which could explain the crazyness
of myhost2... :(

> The second problem that I can't figure out is that this archive above is 
> either corrupted or is being aborted somehow in the middle.  I never get 
> all of the files in /root, only a certain few (all happen to start with 
> a period (.).  WinRAR says that it is corrupted.
> 
> I did some testing on this, because I can tell where the file was ended. 
>  It appears that when a certain subdirectory of /root is backed up 
> (called .spamassassin), it will fail to some extent.  WinRAR reports 
> corruption.  gzip says the file tests okay.  It looks to me that there 
> is probably a file here which is changing as the backup is occuring.

which is probably what happens as mail passes through the system. I
get the same messages sometimes.

> gtar says that there are some file differences:
> #gtar -dzf /dellbak/ibm-root/2005-03-21/ibm-root.2005-03-21.monthly.tar.gz
> root/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist: Mod time differs
> root/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist: Contents differ
> gtar: Skipping to next header
> gtar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
> root/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.mutex: Mod time differs
> root/.spamassassin/bayes.mutex: Mod time differs
> root/.spamassassin/bayes_journal: Mod time differs
> root/.spamassassin/bayes_journal: Size differs
> root/.spamassassin/bayes_seen: Mod time differs
> root/.spamassassin/bayes_seen: Contents differ
> gtar: Skipping to next header
> root/.spamassassin/bayes_toks: Mod time differs
> root/.spamassassin/bayes_toks: Contents differ
> gtar: Skipping to next header
> gtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> 
> Those are the files which seem to be the corrupting factors in the 
> eventual tar.gz file.  It looks to me that gtar might be the culprit 
> here -- it somehow doesn't get file piped into gzip before the file is 
> changed, I guess.

strange, strange... what version of gnu tar is this? 

> Do you know what the "obsolescent" headers are?
> 
> The current workaround is to not backup this entire directory, but I 
> would like to include it if possible.

I think checking out newer tar versions is your best bet. If that
doesn't work, then you should disable your mailer and re-enable it
with a pre/post run script. (yech)

--
grtz,
  - Miek

http://www.miek.nl                   http://www.nlnetlabs.nl