Ontape command

[netwalker1]

Dear All :
as a SCO limitation ,,,
I can't use Files more than 2 GB on my OS ..

and As I am using Ontape command ...
when I tried to create a backup for my Informix Database ,,
the file exceed the 2 GB , and the SCO killed the process ...

So , I need to make compression to the created file by ontape command using ON-The-Fly Technique ..

any suggestions ?

Mohamed Farid
[green]Know Me No Pain , No Me Know Pain !!![/green]
CCNP,CCSP,CCA,MCSE,MCSA

 

[zag]

hi, try making your tape device a named pipe. this can be read by cat in the background, piped to compress and written out to another file, i.e.
mknod /var/tmp/mytape.pipe p # create named pipe

edit onconfig file or change TAPEDEV via onmonitor to /var/tmp/mytape.pipe and
change tape blocksize to 64 or 128
e.g.
TAPEDEV /var/tmp/mytape.pipe # Tape device path
TAPEBLK 128 # Tape block size (Kbytes)

create a script to cat /var/tmp/mytape.pipe in background or type it into the shell, i.e.

cat /var/tmp/mytape.pipe |
compress -c > /var/tmp/mytapebackup.Z &

then kick off your ontape command, which will write to /var/tmp/mytape.pipe, get picked up by the cat and compress running in background and finally written out to /var/tmp/mytapebackup.Z (i am assuming sco has mknod and the compress -c option., sorry it's been a long time since i worked on sco!)
good luck and let me know how you get on or any probs.

 

[netwalker1]

Very Good Idea ..
but how can I restore the file after that ?!

Mohamed Farid
[green]Know Me No Pain , No Me Know Pain !!![/green]
CCNP,CCSP,CCA,MCSE,MCSA

 

[zag]

hi - simple, you do a similar thing in reverse...

uncompress -c /var/tmp/mytapebackup.Z > /var/tmp/mytape.pipe &

nothing will happen until you start reading from the mytape.pipe file, i.e. until you kick off your ontape -r command.

you can always run onstat -D -r from another window to check that your pages are being written out.

if you have an available test system it's got to be worth a try, hasn't it!

 

[netwalker1]

The restore doesn't work !
it gave me corrupted output file ?



Mohamed Farid
[green]Know Me No Pain , No Me Know Pain !!![/green]
CCNP,CCSP,CCA,MCSE,MCSA

 

[zag]

hi - you did shutdown the server 1st, didn't you?

 

[netwalker1]

You mean , shutting down the server before restoring ?
yes I did ...

Mohamed Farid
[green]Know Me No Pain , No Me Know Pain !!![/green]
CCNP,CCSP,CCA,MCSE,MCSA

 

[zag]

ok good.
are you saying your /var/tmp/mytape.pipe file is corrupted?is it still a zero length pipe?
if not, you need to recreate it before you start the restore:
rm -f /var/tmp/mytape.pipe
mknod /var/tmp/mytape.pipe p

and is TAPEDEV still set to /var/tmp/mytape.pipe?

onstat -c | grep TAPEDEV