Following on from my earlier post, I had a problem getting my tape backup working with the latest stable release of Debian on the new backup server. I use flexbackup to run my tape backup and on the older Debian installation, flexbackup would correctly set the block size of the tape and run the backup. On the latest installation, running flexbackup gave an error message running the following commands:
mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk 0
mt -f /dev/nst0 defblksize 0
Running the commands manually gave the response
mt: invalid argument `setblk’ for `tape operation’
A little research uncovered the fact that installing the mt-st package (apt-get install mt-st) fixed the problem and should be installed alongside flexbackup for proper operation on later Debian installations.
I run a dedicated backup server who’s job it is to suck up all the data files from the other servers on a nightly basis to a hard drive and then transfer the lot to tape. It’s been a little flakey lately so I’ve built a replacement which is, in line with other recent changes, a smaller, quieter and altogether greener machine.
I needed to transfer some scripts from the old server to the new and discovered that the old server was not very happy that I had yanked it’s SCSI card and DAT drive. It now failed to boot and gave me a segmentation fault instead. Selecting the recovery option from the Debian GRUB prompt didn’t help so I resorted to a trusted method using SystemRescueCD which allowed me to boot from the CD then issue the following commands:
mkdir /mnt/hd
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/hd
This created a mount point and mounted the root hard drive partition to it. This enabled me to get at the module config files in the server’s /etc directory.
vi /mnt/hd/etc/modules
This loaded up the modules list for boot-up and I simply deleted the aic**** line to remove the SCSI module.
A reboot later after removing the CD and everything is fine again.
I could complain that the aic**** module should handle such a simple error without segmenting and locking up the system and if I hadn’t figured out a work-around I probably would but since I use linux for free, it seems harsh to moan!
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