[Dirvish] Problems w/ pre-server command...

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 04:22:48PM -0500, Trey Blancher wrote:

> Ideally, I would like my setup so that my backup partitions only get
> mounted when I'm about to backup.  So, I tried to  use pre-server to
> mount my partitions before I created the initial image. My master.conf:

An excellent idea.  I do this by calling a shell script, dirvish-daily,
which does setup, then calls dirvish-runall, then does shutdown.  In that
script, I do other things, like keeping track of which vaults actually
complete successfully, and adding a single daily status line to a backup
log file. 

Dirvish looks for the additional configuration information in the vault
config scripts, so they must be mounted first.  Hence the wrapper script;
you can't do this with just the pre- and post- scripts.  I do use those
for keeping track of failures, and initializing remote machines, etc.

In addition, I get a little wilder than just mount/unmount - before
mounting the backup partition on /dev/hdXXX, I do a :
   /sbin/hdparm -zb 1 /dev/hdXXX

After backups and unmount, I do a:
   /sbin/hdparm -b 0 /dev/hdXXX

With the drive disconnected from the bus, and tristated, There is one
more barrier to bad things happening.  However, this may not work for
some 2.6 kernels.

If we can get the 1.3.x version moving, it will make a good platform
for folding some of these behaviors into dirvish itself.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs