Hi all,

I'm trying to set up a backup strategy for my Coda cell pretty much as
instructed by the User and Administration Manual on the Web site but I keep
getting unusual errors about malformed partitions. Any ideas why this might
be happening?

Right now, I added a 4 GB dump disk to my SCM, which is also serving as the
backup host. We have a vicetab like,

blossom.diablonet.net   /vicepa   ftree   width=128,depth=3
blossom.diablonet.net   /vicepb   ftree   width=128,depth=3
harvest.diablonet.net   /vicepa   ftree   width=128,depth=3
teapot.diablonet.net    /vicepa   ftree   width=128,depth=3
teapot.diablonet.net    /vicepb   ftree   width=128,depth=3
blossom.diablonet.net   /backup   backup

and on the SCM machine itself, the disks are looking like,

Filesystem  512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd1a     16603044   3830036  11942856    24%    /
/dev/sd2a     34478498   1133604  31620970     3%    /vicepb
/dev/sd0a      8131958         4   7725358     0%    /backup
kernfs               2         2         0   100%    /kern

The system has a single Exabyte EXB-8505XL tape drive hooked up to it at
/dev/st0. I checked backup.sh and all the configuration looks sane.

So, I type 'backup.sh' as root on the SCM and I see the following in my
backup log:

Partition /vicepa: inodes in use: 130, total: 2097152.
Partition /vicepb: inodes in use: 997, total: 2097152.

Date: Thu 08/17/2006

23:17:31 Partition /vicepa: 63091568K available (minfree=4%), 47771296K
free.
23:17:31 Partition /vicepb: 131018296K available (minfree=4%), 126483880K
free.
23:17:31 Partition /backup: 30901448K available (minfree=4%), 30901432K
free.
23:17:31 Error 'File exists' creating directory /backup/17Aug2006.
23:17:31 Malformed partitions! Cannot prepare for dumping.

Date: Thu 08/17/2006

23:17:31 Malformed partitions! Cannot prepare for dumping.
Can't locate ConfigReader/DirectiveStyle.pm in @INC (@INC contains:
/vice/lib/perl /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/sparc64-netbsd
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/sparc64-netbsd
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl .) at
/usr/local/sbin/tape.pl line 25.

Now the lack of perl module.. whatever.. I can find modules, no biggie. But
does anyone know what it means with the "Malformed partitions" error?
Further, I am not at all sure why it would say /backup/17Aug2006 already
exists, since the /backup directory was empty when I kicked off the backup.

I remember reading somewhere that the backup system was basically obsolete
and that there was a better way to do backup. Does anyone have a good scheme
for something to dump volumes to tape which is at least halfway automated?

Thanks, Sean
scaron_at_umich.edu