Re: [gentoo-server] Re: backup and crontab problem (continued)

[andrea ferraris]

Frank Nørvig wrote:

>> It fails after just a few minutes and the complete backup is 3-4
>> hours so I'm guessing that no writing is done, but I'll try adding -v
>> to see if anything is succesful.
>
>
> Same result, no data written as far as I can see.
>
> [2004-10-08 05:11:52] uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
> groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel),11(floppy),20(dialout),26(tape),27(video)
>
> root
> SHELL=/bin/sh
> PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
> PWD=/root
> HOME=/root
> SHLVL=2
> LOGNAME=root
> _=/usr/bin/env
> tar: /dev/nst0: Cannot open: Input/output error
> tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>
>
> Is there anything else I can do to get more debugging information?
>
> Frank
>
>
I can't understand why it fails, but I can give some useless advice to 
try to see if the things change.
If it was a shell script you could get more debug info with -x as 
argument of the script shell:
#!/bin/sh -x (at the begining of the first line)
In /var/log/messages aren't any message about this /dev/nst0 I/O error?
I seen random  I/O errors of such type with a broken DAT.
Is the tape rewinded?
Could you try to give the full path of the tar command?
/bin/sh is the same that /bin/bash that you have when you succeed?
What's SHLVL? I seen it's different in the 2 environments (failing and 
good).
I seen in another message that you launched the perl script with 
/usr/bin/perl <PERLSCRIPT>,
I think that you could get the same issue with
#!/usr/bin/perl at the beginning of the first line of the script, 
without /usr/bin/perl before
<PERLSCRIPT>.

Please, let me know if you can solve, because I'm really interested in 
this trouble.

Ragards,

Andrea
---
it seamed like a good idea at the time
Brian Kernighan