Installation/OS Specific Notes/Installing Amanda on IRIX

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When setting the tape device name in either amanda.conf or one of the changer configuration files, make sure you specify the "variable" device name, which has a 'v' on the end. If not, IRIX will write 4KByte blocks instead of the 32KByte blocks AMANDA tells it to. This apparantly works OK unless you take the tape to a non-IRIX system, where amrestore will complain about a short (4096) read.

If you do end up in this situation, the dd command to use to pipe into your system restore program is:

dd if=/dev/whatever bs=4k skip=8 | ...

Jean-Francois Malouin <[email protected]> reports that, if you are going to use an IRIX host as the tape server, you *must* patch your system with *all* kernel and scsi rollup patches, otherwise you may end up with useless tapes, due to tape rewinding after short periods of inactivity. See http://www-viz.tamu.edu/~sgi-faq/ for more details.

Some unpatched version of xfsdump are reported as not printing estimates. This causes estimates to take much longer than they had to, because backups are always performed twice. According to Mike Acar <[email protected]>, patch 2333 for IRIX 5.3 and 6.1 will fix this problem.

IRIX 6

Seems like SGI make program is a bit broken, in a way that causes it to rebuild some files if doesn't have to if you happen to run make again. Using GNU make fixes this problem.

If you have xfs filesystems to back up, AMANDA will pick xfsdump automatically.

IRIX 6.5.x

Luc Lalonde <[email protected]> contributed the following notes:

If you use a jukebox, you must set the ownership of the robot-changer device to the AMANDA operator:group in /etc/ioperms. Here's my configuration:

/etc/ioperms: /dev/scsi/sc8d6l0 0600 amanda backup

Otherwise the ownership:group is changed to "root:sys" after each reboot. When you do upgrades, check the file /var/sysgen/master.d/scsi to see if it has changed. Otherwise your jukebox could be rendered unuseable. In particular, check if it has been replaced by a new version and renamed to "./scsi.O/.".

If you use the AMANDA package provided by freeware.sgi.com, you are not affected by the first question since at compile time the AMANDA operator is "root:sys".

IRIX 6.5.x/amanda > 2.5.2p1

With the addition of the glib requirement in amanda, amanda must now be compiled with the same compiler which was used to compile glib. This is in part due to the use of the "inline" keyword in glib header files.