vxdump hangs

[John Kelly_3]

I am having a problem with vxdump hanging halfway through a job. It has done this three times in a row (on different filesystems)
The system is a newly installed L2000-36 with 11.00 plus the Apr. 2004 support plus pack and HW enablement. It was previously 11.11 and so we installed JFS 3.3 to access the data disks created under 11.11. The drive is an Ultrium 2 which seems to work fine with fbackup. I have applied the latest vxdump accumulative patch (PHCO_21242) I applied the latest SCSI Tape patch (PHKL_29898).
Any suggestions?

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi John,

are the filesystem unmounted while vxdump is running? I've seen numerous effects dumping active filesystems!

mfG Peter

[John Kelly_3]

Hi Peter,

No the filesystems are mounted. We use this same vxdump based backup script on 4 other servers without unmounting filesystems with no problems. It isn't compulsory to unmount filesystems is it?

John

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

in the man page for 11.00 of vxdump you find:

NOTES

Dumps should be performed with the file system unmounted or the system in single-user environment (see init(1M)) to insure a consistent dump. If the VxFS Advanced package is installed, the dump can be performed in the multi-user environment using a snapshot file system with the online backup facility (see the snapof=file option of mount_vxfs(1M)).

I would give the umount solution a try!

mfG Peter

[John Kelly_3]

Thanks for your reply Peter.

I'll consider doing as you suggest although there is a reason why this is not my preferred option. Currently our script detects all LVs to be backed up, but if a umount is required then they would have to be umounted in a specific hard-coded order which would mean the LVs would have to be hard-coded.

Does nobody have any workarounds without unmounting the filesystems? Perhaps I should try a fuser -k on the mountpoints before proceeding?

JohnK

[John Kelly_3]

I have been doing a fuser -ku prior to the vxdump backup since I was having the problems and this has cleared up the hangs.