Taper: unable to allocate buffers

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Why do I get taper unable to allocate buffers?

This is beause taper requires sysv shared memory or semaphores, and there is none, or not enough. On *BSD systems. you may get this on a system that previously worked because some other program has reserved the resources available. (On my OpenBSD system it was Postgresql).

On OpenBSD

The solution is to add the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf

kern.seminfo.semmni=256
kern.seminfo.semmns=2048
kern.shminfo.shmmax=50331648    # 48MB 

I believe changing settings these requires a reboot, but I could be wrong. You might even need larger values if your database is working hard! Once the problem occurs, Amanda does not free the resources. You can free them manually with

ipcrm `ipcs -o | perl -ne ' { m/^m\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+\S+\s+operator operator\s+(\d)$/; print "-m $1 " if ($2 eq 0 and $3 eq 0) }'`

--Acgrillet 08:10, 10 July 2009 (PDT)