Issues doing fbackup on VxFS Version 4 Filesystems

[KPS]

I have a Oracle Instance made up of 9 lvols in one single Volume Group. Up until just a few days ago, the VxFS Version on all the lvols in the VG was Version 3. This all exists on a system running the HP-UX 11i OS. The reason the mountpoints are showing up as VxFS 3 in my opinion, was due to the VolGroup being exported from a system that was HP-UX 11.0 and that's a guess?????

Just recently, we changed and recreated 2 of the 9 mountpoints that were originally VxFS version 3. Since we didn't set any flag options or specifications in our newfs commands when making these, these 2 mountpoints show up as VxFS Version 4. I understand this is the default of VxFS for 11i.

Since the changes were made, we have not been able to get a backup of these 2 mountpoints. When running the backup on only these 2 mountpoints that are now VxFS 4, the server hangs and 6 lvmkd daemons sop up all the System Resources and the server then becomes unavailable, which in turn needs to be rebooted. We have just patched our server with the latest patch Bundle from Dec 2002, so it is up to date now. We have since tested another fbackup to DLT Tape and it fails with the same symptoms, with no leads in the syslog??

Would anyone have any ideas as to why the backup of the newly created lvols in this VG wouldn't be working??

Thanks,
-Ken

[Ross Zubritski · Accepted solution]

Hi Ken,

My first question would be, can you cd /"filesystem in question" and ls?

Does this hang the box as well?

[KPS]

Yes I can cd into the filesystem in question without any issues what-so-ever. All the data I see there looks to be fine.

[KPS]

I forgot comments on whether cd or ls hangs the box and they do not. I get the output from commands such as those right back. All seems to be normal when I cd or ls.

[Steven E. Protter]

No matter what version of ORacle or NFS you are using you can not get good backups of Oracle using fabackup if the database is up.

Such backups are considered fuzzy by oracle and can only be recovered from unless there have been no database transactions since database start. Even then its hairy.

Trying to do hot backups with fbackup can lead to the symptoms you report. fbackup can't do that.

The real issue here is probably patches over and above December 2002.

I'm thinking start with lvm patches, maybe jfs and panic type patches.
There are issues with the lvm daemons that that are solved by patches that did not make the December bundle.

I'd go over the /etc/fstab and configuration of the lvols were set up consistently.

SEP

[monasingh_1]

out of curiosity, I will stop the oracle and try to use tar or cpio to check if you can take those files of tape. I do not think you should have any problem with ver4 vxfs.