Sun E450 and Sun ATM 3.0...

If you don't have the above hardware this message is probably of no
interest.... it's not a complaint just friendly information to whose who may
be using the hardware

Client:  Sun E450/2.5.1, Sun ATM 3.0, ADSM 3.1.0.5
Server: AIX 4.1.5, 155MB ATM, ADSM 3.1.1.3

Backups are interesting -- unless you need them you may never know they
aren't any good.

After I had been running ADSM on the 450 for 4 months, without needing any
of the backups, we found that we needed to do a restore.  We found that the
restored file was corrupted.  I discovered that ftp, of large files, between
the client and server machines produced files that "sum -r" would indicate
were different although the file size was the same.  This ftp behavior was
inconsistent -- sometimes the files were the same sometimes different.

Sun provided a patch (106864-01) that was released at the end of last
week(10/9) for the ATM drivers.  At this point things seem to be working
correctly.  To insure the integrity of the backups I deleted all of the
filespaces belonging to the E450 so everything would backup again.

For what it's worth -- the data corruption attributed to ftp manifested
itself in ADSM backups as well as ADSM/API backups created by SQL-BACKTRACK.

While I realize that additional validation of backup data should have been
done when the machine was installed, I know that sometimes that just doesn't
happen..

Tom Fluker
tom.fluker AT viasystems DOT com