I can see how the sym link could fool netbackup.

NetBackup probably looks at the mnttab or something similar to
determine which filesystems are NFS -- in the mnttab, it sees /filer
so it ignores /filer. When it gets to /mnt/filer it doesn't see it as
a symbolic link and it's not listed in the mnttab as being an NFS
filesystem, so it gets backed up. Because I've never heard of someone
doing a mount to a symbolic link before, I'm not surprised that
Veritas doesn't expand the paths in the mnttab out to the actual path.

-Charlie

On 11/3/05, Dave Markham <dave.markham AT fjserv DOT net> wrote:
> Paul Keating wrote:
>
> > yes, the backup was traversing the snapshots as well.
> > however, it shouldn't have been an issue, since "follow NFS" was
> > turned off.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure at this point that it was happening because the mount
> > point was created (/mnt/filer) and a symlink created /filer ->
> > /mnt/filer and then the share was mounted onto /filer, rather than
> > /mnt/filer.
> >
> > this link deeked out netbackup, so it couldn't see that the mount was
> > of type "NFS".
> >
> > I haven't been able to thouroughly test this theory yet, though.
> >
> > Paul
> >
> >     -----Original Message-----
> >     *From:* Jeff Cleverley [mailto:jeff_cleverley AT agilent DOT com]
> >     *Sent:* November 2, 2005 10:17 PM
> >     *To:* Paul Keating
> >     *Cc:* Mark.Donaldson AT cexp DOT com; veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn 
> > DOT edu
> >     *Subject:* Re: [Veritas-bu] cross mount points? NFS?
> >
> >     Paul Keating wrote:
> >
> >>     I didn't do it, and I was as suprised as the next guy when I saw it.
> >>     The backup ran real long (250 Gig, rather than the expected 2
> >>     Gig) so the admin of the box sent me a df output, so I just
> >>     thought it was mounted on /mnt/filer then I browsed the backup
> >>     image and said "WTF???"
> >>
> >     Paul,
> >
> >     I'm seeing a similar thing associated with a new post I'll do.  I
> >     found the df or bdf commands were not listing the "."
> >     directories.  The backups were walking all of the .snapshot
> >     directories and backing up considerably more data than expected.
> >
> >     Jeff
> >
> Cant see how that could fool netbackup unless follow symbolic links is
> checked. There is an option to follow them. I can see if this was set
> and becuase your NFS volume was mounted from a sym link that it may
> ignore the fact follow NFS wasnt checked, but it should have picked
> /filler up as a sym link to start with and just backed the link up and
> not where it goes.
>
> Dave
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