Paul Haldane wrote:

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Ian R. Justman wrote:

I managed to get things working on limiting the files I want in a given set, but it hasn't solved my larger problem, the ethernet interface goes down during the course of the backup, but bounces back online. From what I've been able to garner via Google, the machine, a Sun Ultra 5, appears to suffer a design defect that if the network interface is under heavy load, the interface will shut down, then shortly thereafter, it'll come back online. Our NetSaint server will sometimes send (false) notifications showing that the server machine is down then back up.

Any ideas on how to get AMANDA to take it easy when sending data to the backup server? I'd rather do it at the application layer if possible.

I don't think there's a way of doing this with Amanda. The network bandwidth settings don't control the bandwidth used by backups once they're started, they just stop more backups being started until bandwidth has been freed up.

THe real solution to your problem is to fix the hardware. We had the same issues with some Ultra5s being used as file servers (it's just some revisions of the system board). Find a supported PCI network card and use that instead of the on-board interface.

A temp workaround might be to rsync the disk to another system and back
it up from there.  You might have the same interface issues with rsync
(especially on the first rsync run), but the Amanda backup would finish.
The rsyncs may or may not timeout during the link failure, but you could
wrap it in a script that would keep re-running it until it completes, and
rsync won't have to start over like Amanda would.

Frank
('vacationing' at LISA)