Yesterday, Chris Krusch wrote about his ADSM Solaris V2 client:

> I'm attempting an archive of a single file in the
> /var/mail directory using:
>    archive /var/mail/testfile

> The archive client seems to lock up after archive
> processing is invoked.  The command works fine
> if we chose a file in a much smaller directory, such as
>     archive /tmp/testfile

> P.S. Out of curiousity we also tried it with a version 1.2 client
> with the same results.

Chris,

  We just recently detected similar behavior in our internal testing,
using SELECTIVE (we don't see it with INCREMENTAL) to backup a few
files from very large filesystems on UNIX clients.  We are currently
investigating why we are only now detecting this behavior, when
as you noticed, the code in this area has not been changed
since Version 1.

  Two workarounds we have found:
1) Backing up the file as root user, or
2) Creating a virtual mountpoint for that directory to reduce the
size of the effective filesystem

  We have two strategies:
1) We are looking for a short-term fix.  If there was a recent
client or server code change that allowed this behavior to
suddenly show up, and we can easily redo that change, we will.
However, the basic code which has been there since Version 1
cannot be easily or quickly changed.
2) More long-term, we want to restructure some of our client code and
the way we perform some of our client commands in a future release,
which would solve the problem at its root cause.

Meanwhile, please try the workarounds.

  -- MJ Lopatin
     ADSM Client Development