iglesias@orion.oac.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) (03/17/90)
We're trying to get remote dumps (using rdump) working from several
DECstation 3100s to a Sun with an Exabyte drive. Our current setup
for Sun owners is this:
To start the filesave, our operators get on to root on one of our
systems and execute a script that does:
rsh remotehost -l dumper dumplevel
where 'dumplevel' is 0 or 7. dumper is an unprived account in
the operator group on the Sun that runs rdump (which is suid root)
and sends the dump to 'tape@exabytehost' (Sun's dump allows a
user spec in the remote host specification).
Here's some problems we've run into trying to get this scheme working
on the DECstations:
1. rdump on the DECstations is not suid root. Is there any problem
making it suid root and making it non-world accessable? Is there
another way around this? We really need to run this from a
non-prived account since most people don't want us doing things
as root on their systems unless they request it.
2. Ultrix rdump doesn't allow a user spec on the remote host specification.
One way around this would be to use dump and pipe the output into
an 'rsh exabytehost -l tape' that starts up dd. Any other ideas
are welcome!
3. Does rdump figure out a good blocking factor to use? We use the
'c' option to Sun's rdump, which sets the density to 1000, block
to 126, and length to 425 (which we override with the 's' option).
There's no 'b' option that I can find in Ultrix rdump. Suggestions
for the settings of s (length) and d (density) are welcome too.
We'd like to keep the same operator interface for this so that the
operators only have to remember one command to type to start the
remote saves, instead of having to know "this is a DECstation, so I need
to do this instead". Disclaimer: I didn't set up the Sun save stuff,
so no flames about how it's done. There's probably too many Suns we're
saving to make any major changes to how it works.
Thanks in advance,
Mike Iglesias
University of California, Irvine
Internet: iglesias@orion.oac.uci.edu
BITNET: iglesias@uci
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