[comp.unix.wizards] Dumping Remote Clients on Suns

simpson@trwarcadia.uucp (04/21/89)

How do most people in the net world out there dump client disks?  
I have a remote shell that I run to currently dump the clients.  The
line in the script looks like

rsh client -l root /etc/dump 9udf 6250 dumphost:/dev/nrmt8 /dev/rsd0g

This works except for when it takes two tapes.  Then the dump program
tries to open /dev/tty when it asks for confirmation and it of course fails.
I told Sun this was an error and they disagreed.  So my next alternative was
to try remote logging in.

rlogin hostname -l root << endmarker
...text here...
endmarker

This didn't work either.  Rlogin won't take standard input that is not a tty.
Any suggestions?
	Scott Simpson
	TRW Space and Defense Sector
	oberon!trwarcadia!simpson  	(UUCP)
	trwarcadia!simpson@usc.edu	(Internet)

brankley@usfvax2.EDU (Bob Brankley) (04/23/89)

In article <1746@spp2.UUCP>, simpson@trwarcadia.uucp writes:
> How do most people in the net world out there dump client disks?  
> I have a remote shell that I run to currently dump the clients.  The

Several months back, we at USF had a similar problem to yours:  whenever our
remote dumps took more than one tape the whole dump was aborted.  After a small
debate we came to the common decision that the only way to perform multi-volume
remote dumps was to place the dump command in the .login of the user performing
the dump.  Let me explain further ...

On our computers we use a modified version of a program called "Backup" which
we procured from the USENET some 8-10 months ago.  To make a long story short,
"Backup" is an intelligent interface to dump which figures out the appropriate
backup(s) to do on a given day and then calls dump to perform the backup(s).
We then modified the .login of the "operator" ID on each of our machines to
call our version of "Backup" whenever user "operator" logged in.  By placing
the "Backup" command in the .login, we avoided the non-interactive nature of
rsh and allowed ourselves multi-volume backups.  Please feel free to mail me
at the below address if you have any further questions.


Bob Brankley
System Administrator
University of South Florida Computer Science and Engineering Department
INTERNET:  brankley@usfvax2.csee.usf.edu
UUCP:      gatech!usfvax2!brankley

tr@dduck.ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold) (04/26/89)

On the subject of "Dumping Remote Clients on Suns",
simpson@trwarcadia.uucp writes:

$ How do most people in the net world out there dump client disks?  
$ I have a remote shell that I run to currently dump the clients.  The
$ line in the script looks like
$ 
$ rsh client -l root /etc/dump 9udf 6250 dumphost:/dev/nrmt8 /dev/rsd0g
$ 
$ This works except for when it takes two tapes.  Then the dump program
$ tries to open /dev/tty when it asks for confirmation and it of course fails.
$ I told Sun this was an error and they disagreed.  So my next alternative was
$ to try remote logging in.
$ 
$ rlogin hostname -l root << endmarker
$ ...text here...
$ endmarker
$ 
$ This didn't work either.  Rlogin won't take standard input that is not a tty.
$ Any suggestions?

Dump reads from /dev/tty, as you have noticed.   It does not read from
stdin.  None of the ideas like the ones you have shown will work for
this reason.

The solution is to use rdump.   Rdump reads from /dev/tty also but
allows you to use a tape on a remote machine.

Tom Reingold                   |INTERNET:       tr@ctt.bellcore.com
Bell Communications Research   |UUCP:           bellcore!ctt!tr
444 Hoes La room 1E225         |PHONE:          (201) 699-7058 [work],
Piscataway, NJ 08854           |                (201) 287-2345 [home]