vdump not completing the task in 5.1B

[Vijayasekar Rajsekar]

I have a problem with "vdump" on one of my partitions as described below:

OS: Tru64 5.1B with Patch 4 running on DS20E

The "vdump" output prints these lines and there is no further progress. The "Compression" and "Tape in Use" lights on the tape drive are constantly ON. The light on the hard drive is continuously ON.

prg_root#> /sbin/vdump -N -v -0 -u -f /dev/ntape/tape0_d1 /users
path : /users
dev/fset : users_dmn#users
type : advfs
advfs id : 0x3e42ab82.000cac70.1
vdump: Date of last level 0 dump: the start of the epoch
vdump: Dumping directories
-----------------------------------------------
prg_root#> file /dev/ntape/tape0_d1
/dev/ntape/tape0_d1: character special (19/121) SCSI #1 "DLT8000" tape #6 (SCSI ID #0) (SCSI LUN #6)

The disk (/users) has the following sizes:
Drive (disk1c) size = 17782536 K
Drive used size = 12323700 K (71% full)

As a final note, I can successfully backup my other disk drives (/, /usr, etc.) to the same tape device using the same "vdump" command. As an alternate method, I am using "tar" to backup this drive and there are no errors.

Why is "vdump" not completing its task for this particular drive ? Any pointers will be appreciated.

Regards...

[Johan Brusche · Accepted solution]

Did you check binary.errlog for errors on dsk1 ?
Although the symptoms are not the same you could try the vdump patch for patchkit#4, see:
T64KIT0024267-V51BB25-E-20041122
http://www8.itrc.hp.com/service/patch/patchDetail.do?BC=patch.breadcrumb.main|patch.breadcrumb.search|&patchid=T64KIT0024267-V51BB25-E-20041122&context=tru:tru64:5.1b

__ Johan.

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

how long have you waited for vdump to complete?
Have you checked the drive with dd?

greetings,

Michael

[Vijayasekar Rajsekar]

Thanks Johan/ Michael. 'binary.errlog' has no entries regarding this backup activity. I need to verify my patch kit for this specific 'vdump' patch. Also I waited for nearly 4 hours and there was no progress.

Michael, I haven't checked the drive using 'dd' command. I suppose the command is:
"dd if=/dev/ntape/tape0_d1 of=foo ibs=800 cbs=80 conv=ascii". If not correct, let me know.

The server is off-site and I will get back with the output from 'dd' soon.

Regards...

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

actually I was talking about the disk drive like:
dd if=/dev/rdisk/dsk1c of=/dev/null bs=1024k

hth,

Michael

[Mulgund]

Vijay,

This looks like a known problem to me.

Pl. confirm that vdump memory usage is very
high (~ 80%) of available memory on the m/c, when you see this problem.

In V51b pk4, vdump on a file system with over 100K files either fails with "Not enough memory to generate link table" or is exteremly slow due to very high memory usage.

Pl. refer to
http://www.itrc.hp.com/service/patch/patchDetail.do?patchid=T64KIT0024267-V51BB25-E-20041122

For the ERP.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Srinivas.

[Vijayasekar Rajsekar]

Sorry about the delay in getting back the status since the server is out-of-site. The 'vdump' OS patch did resolve this problem. Thanks to Srinivas, Johan and Michael for your time and support.

Best Regards ... Rajsekar

[Vijayasekar Rajsekar]

This problem was resolved by applying the patch.