IDS Forum

Re: ontape to disk

Posted By: Art Kagel
Date: Thursday, 9 July 2009, at 12:25 p.m.

In Response To: ontape to disk (Schmitz, Rob B[EQ])

The 2GB limit went away in 9.40, not in 7.3x, you are correct. Tell you
company that right now they can upgrade from 7.31 and/or 9.40 to
11.50.latest for just the cost of a support renewal. Considering that 9.40
went out of support in April and 7.31 goes out of support in September, I'd
say that's a good deal.

As to why the archive is taking more output files on Saturday than other
days, no clue.

Art

Art S. Kagel
Oninit (www.oninit.com)
IIUG Board of Directors (art@iiug.org)

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that my own opinions are my own opinions and
do not reflect on my employer, Oninit, the IIUG, nor any other organization
with which I am associated either explicitly or implicitly. Neither do
those opinions reflect those of other individuals affiliated with any entity
with which I am affiliated nor those of the entities themselves.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Schmitz, Rob B[EQ] <
Rob.B.Schmitz@embarq.com> wrote:

> Good morning IDS folks!
>
> Sorry for the long post, but I have been wrestling with an ontape script
> for
> some time now and seem to have hit a brick wall. We currently have 156
> instances on 78 servers. We have IDS 7.31 and 9.40 of various levels
> running
> on Sun, HP, and AIX. We have successfully used BMC's SQL-BackTrack as our
> storage manager with onbar for many years. My company decided they no
> longer
> want to pay for the BMC license so I need another method for performing
> database backups. I looked at ISM but it has too many limitations. Some of
> our
> instances are over 1 TB and we have many large chunks.
>
> I would love to be able to upgrade to 11.5, but again, the company does not
> want to spend any resources to upgrade. Their stated goal is to quit using
> Informix. Although that has been a goal for over ten years, we haven't
> gotten
> rid of one app yet. However, that means they won't spend anything to
> upgrade.
> By the way, my company is getting rid of SQL-BackTrack for Oracle as well,
> but
> rman seems to fill the void fairly well.
>
> I feel that my solution is to use ontape to disk. I searched the IIUG
> repository and Google and the best I could find was a little script named
> auto_ontape.ksh, written by Peter Tashkoff in 1998. Because the script was
> originally written for a tape jukebox, I had to make a few modifications,
> but
> it has turned out to be very useful. This script watches the output from
> ontape and when it sees the prompt to "Please mount tape " it jiggers the
> link
> specified in TAPEDEV and issues an echo to serve as the "return". Here is
> what
> that script looks like:
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> echo
>
> sleep 20
>
> echo "\nThe first file in the series is ${ARCH_FILE}" >> $OUTFILE
>
> while [ `onstat -g ath | grep arcbackup | wc -l` -gt 0 ]
> do
>
> sleep 10
>
> if [ `tail -1 $OUTFILE | awk '{print $2}'` = "mount" ]
>
> then
>
> let INCRMNT=INCRMNT+1
>
>
> ARCH_FILE=${BACKUP_DIR}/${INFORMIXSERVER}_${TIMESTAMP}-${INCRMNT}.Level_${LVL}
>
> touch $ARCH_FILE
>
> chmod 777 $ARCH_FILE
>
> rm -f ${BASE_DIR}/${INST}/links/tape/tapedev
>
> ln -s ${ARCH_FILE} ${BASE_DIR}/${INST}/links/tape/tapedev
>
> echo
>
> echo "\nNew file is ${ARCH_FILE}" >> $OUTFILE
>
> fi
> done
>
> echo "\nThe last file in the series is ${ARCH_FILE}" >> $OUTFILE
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Most of the environment variables, including the first ARCH_FILE, are set
> in
> the calling script. auto_ontape.ksh is called by:
>
> auto_ontape.ksh | ontape -s -L $LVL >> $OUTFILE 2>> $OUTFILE
>
> The calling script does some instance checking before calling
> auto_ontape.ksh
> and it performs some expiration functions afterwards.
>
> This works most of the time. It appears to always work for our 9.40
> instances
> because I set TAPESIZE to 0 and we don't have to worry about multiple
> backup
> files. The problem I have is that on the 7.31 instances on which I am
> testing,
> the output file gets so many "Please mount tape " messages so quickly that
> the
> output file fills the filesystem holding our message files (different from
> the
> filesystem holding the backup files). So far, it seems to only do this on
> Saturday nights. There are no informix cron jobs that are different on
> Saturday than any other night. I am also investigating if the tape ops
> folks
> are backing up the server at that time, but thus far I have not found any
> reason for this to happen.
>
> I found a reference to this same issue in my Google searches, but I cannot
> find any reason for it or how to avoid it. I also read that the 2 GB file
> limit went away in 7.2, but that does not seem to be the case. (I believe
> it
> finally went away in 9.x.)
>
> Does anyone have any idea what causes this behavior? Alternatively, does
> anyone know of a different script that could avoid this problem?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
> Rob Schmitz
> Embarq Data Management
> rob.b.schmitz@embarq.com
> www.embarq.com
>
>
>
> *******************************************************************************
> Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum.
>
>

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Messages In This Thread

• ontape to disk
  Schmitz, Rob B[EQ] -- Thursday, 9 July 2009, at 11:20 a.m.
  • Re: ontape to disk
    Art Kagel -- Thursday, 9 July 2009, at 12:25 p.m.
    • RE: ontape to disk
      Schmitz, Rob B[EQ] -- Thursday, 9 July 2009, at 12:50 p.m.
      • Re: ontape to disk
        Art Kagel -- Thursday, 9 July 2009, at 1:03 p.m.
  • Re: ontape to disk
    GUSTAVO TOBARES -- Thursday, 9 July 2009, at 11:44 p.m.
    • RE: ontape to disk
      Schmitz, Rob B[EQ] -- Friday, 10 July 2009, at 8:55 a.m.
      • Re: ontape to disk
        Art Kagel -- Friday, 10 July 2009, at 1:01 p.m.

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