On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 03:35:30PM -0400, Neil Horman wrote:
> Hey all-
> 	I had recently set up a backup server using the latest git tree and
> discovered that while backups could be taken the backup utility wasn't properly
> marking the backed up volumes as ancient.  I found I was able to do so manually,
> but needed to specify the backup volume id to volutil, rather than the primary
> volume id.  The backup utility was having the same issue, and I wrote this patch
> to fix it.  With it, I'm able to take backups and mark the corresponding volumes
> as ancient properly.  I also converted the call to use NewVolMarkAsAncient,
> which is in line with what volutil uses.

Not sure why that original code isn't working because the
NewVolMarkAsAncient implementation on the server simply looks up the
volume replica id and replicated volume group id values from the VRDB
and then calls the same VolMarkAsAncient function.

So although volutil is using a different RPC2 call compared to the
backup utility they both end up doing the same thing and as far as I
can see the backup program is calling the old RPC with the correct
arguments so without understanding why it is broken, I don't feel
comfortable applying this patch.

Our backups for the past 8 years have been run using a modified version
of Amanda, which is why I needed a better way to use volutil ancient
from a script. The NewVolMarkAsAncient implementation was added to
simplify the arguments needed for volutil ancient, and we already needed
to know the backup volume id because it is used by volutil dump.

More recently I've started using BackupPC which needed no changes to
itself, we only needed a fairly trivial script on the Coda servers that
uses volutil and codadump2tar to return a tar formatted stream. The
change that I added to Coda was an improved way to create a volume dump
so that we can efficiently run incremental dumps while still having
access to full path information for the codadump2tar conversion.

Jan