kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) (04/15/88)
Well, I had to do it again, and it went a bit better this time, but there are still a few funnies. I'm hoping for comments and enlightenment from the net. And some of you may be interested in some of the gotchas. I had just gotten a bunch of stuff, and was putting it in various places in this ever-shrinking bedroom (Telebit Trailblazer modem, Macintosh II, for instance). I was installing cables and moving equipment to make room. Somewhere in the process, ghengis (the 3b1) started choking on his disk drive, and having serious trouble running anything at all, and even in rebooting. THAT VERY MORINING I had backed up!!!! Will wonders never cease. Attilla's disk (he's the 7300 with the outboard 80-MB drive) had just come back from repair, and I was going to install the backup on him. So the backup was current. For reasons I have discussed here before, my backups are 'by name', and are of the root directory '/', so they contain everything, without regard to dates. I went to install this thing, and after fumbling around a bit, thought every- thing was going fine: I had told it to ignore which files were more recent, and the first tape was spinning okay. It died as soon as I mounted the second tape. The system was so strange at this point that I could not use the tape, and after rebooting, I could not log on. After some thought, it occurred to me that the Tape software keeps some stuff in /tmp which might be getting overwritten by the first tape. So, I started in again: Foundation Set, Tape Software, restore folders. I selected all folders in the root directory except /tmp and /mnt (the floppy had been mounted when I took the tape backup, and its files turned out to be on the tape). As soon as the reload was finished, I shut down and restarted (I've got lots of software that needs to be initialized right). Now most things worked okay, but there are some funnies: 1) The tape drive was unusable, but became okay when I removed and reinstalled the software. I really don't have a clue about this. 2) Rn gave me a greeting message that I had not seen since I first installed it. Some file somewhere must tell it whether I'm a new user, but I can't imagine why it got lost. I haven't done a whole lot else yet, although my newsfeed has dropped some news on me, so I know that's working. Anyone have any comments?
kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) (04/15/88)
Some other observations about this restore process (see my last article). The restore process for some reason NEVER restores the modification dates. I now wish I had changed /usr/bin/Trestore.sh to have the -m flag in the tapecpio command before I did the restore. EVERYTHING now has today's date. When I rebooted after the restore, I was worried that the system rebooted itself after doing the file system check. Then I thought about it and stopped worrying. There's a comment in /etc/profile.hd which bears on this: some of the files (/lib/shlib, /dev/console, and some others) are open when the restore is happening, and restoring onto them seems to do something funny to the inode reference counts which fsck has to clean up. This used to happen with the Foundation Set, too, until AT&T figured out the fix. Looks like more trouble than I want to worry about unless there's a big reason to worry.