[Veritas-bu] Netbackup 5.1 and autofs/Linux

I wouldn't backup via autofs.  First why backup via NFS rather than
backing up the filesystem from its native host?  You still have the
network impact but don't have to worry about NFS' overhead and quirks.


Second if you really have to do NFS why do autofs?   You could set up a
script to mount the filesystems manually to avoid the timeout issues.
The script would do the mount, then do the backup, then unmount the
filesystems.



-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Afsheen
Bigdeli
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 4:31 PM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Netbackup 5.1 and autofs/Linux

All,

I'm trying to back up a directory on a Linux client server (let's call 
the directory /mnt/devices/); this directory contains links to several 
autofs mounted devices. I've set up a policy to back up the entire 
directory, but I've run into an odd problem. It seems that the backup 
job steps into one of the autofs mounted directories, and begins backing

up files, only to have the following happen: 1) the backup job fail on a

particular file in one of the autofs mounted directories, or 2) the 
backup job succeeds on several of the autofs mounted directories, but 
intermittently is unable to mount one of them.

It appears that the autofs timeout (in this case, 300 seconds) expires 
while Netbackup is in the process of backing up a particular file (or, 
more explicitly, while it is _not_ making a mount request for a given 
directory or file). Is there any way to prevent this behavior? To put it

another way, does anyone here back up Linux clients with devices mounted

via autofs, and if so do you have any tips or advice?

I apologize in advance if any of this is unclear or if I'm making any 
incorrect assumptions - any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Adam Bigdeli
Network Engineer
Logicworks
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