From owner-freebsd-questions  Sat Jan  3 07:54:04 1998
Return-Path: <owner-freebsd-questions>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id HAA16860
          for questions-outgoing; Sat, 3 Jan 1998 07:54:04 -0800 (PST)
          (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions)
Received: from maila.telia.com (root@maila.telia.com [194.236.189.1])
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id HAA16851
          for <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>; Sat, 3 Jan 1998 07:53:58 -0800 (PST)
          (envelope-from girgen@partitur.se)
Received: from d1o62.telia.com (root@d1o62.telia.com [195.198.198.241])
	by maila.telia.com (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA11658;
	Sat, 3 Jan 1998 16:53:42 +0100 (MET)
Received: from partitur.se (t6o62p6.telia.com [195.198.199.66])
	by d1o62.telia.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA28710;
	Sat, 3 Jan 1998 16:53:40 +0100 (MET)
Message-ID: <34AE5EEA.58E692E8@partitur.se>
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 16:53:14 +0100
From: Palle Girgensohn <girgen@partitur.se>
Organization: Partitur
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.5-STABLE i386)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Jason Hudgins <jason@www.dancooks.com>
CC: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Good backup hardware????
References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980102101339.20795A-100000@www.dancooks.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Hello Jason,

I'm in a similar situation. What happens for you is that the tape has
reached the end (my guess; I get write errors when I reach
end-of-tapes), and is trying to tell you this on the tty; "fopen on
/dev/tty" means that it cannot talk to a console, probably because
you're running it from cron, or detached the dump process from the tty.

AFAIK, you can't run dump from cron, at least not directly. (I'd like to
hear from you folks! How do you make automated dumps?) Dump needs user
interaction when an error or end-of-tape occurs, or it will get
suspended or fail. Hence, it must be started from a console. I guess one
could make a script that runs on the console and sleeps during the
day...? Or maybe let cron attach the dump command to a console (better,
but how,and is it possible?).

What does your dump command look like? If your tape can swallow no more
than 2GB, you've reached the end-of-tape. Using the B option, yuo can
tell dump about the tape lenght, and get "tape-end" instead of
"write-error". If you expect hardware compression, are you sure it is
switched on? Probably not?

Hope this helps
Palle


Jason Hudgins wrote:
> 
> I have a need for solid automated backups on my companies webserver,
> so far I've tried both an HP DAT drive and Seagate DAT.  The HP
> didn't live to long, and the Seagates performance has been
> laughable at best.  I've only gotten a successful backup about 10% of
> the time.  I need a system that can backup about 5 gigs of data daily.
> 
> Here are the tails my last two logged attempts..
> 
>    DUMP: 89.11% done, finished in 0:09
>    DUMP: write error 1964580 blocks into volume 1
>    DUMP: fopen on /dev/tty fails: Device not configured
>    DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> 
>    DUMP: estimated 2117660 tape blocks.
>    DUMP: write error 20 blocks into volume 1
>    DUMP: fopen on /dev/tty fails: Device not configured
>    DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> 
> Can anyone offer any suggestions?
> 
> Jason Hudgins