Well...

PTF6 is out, the symlink.doc file is gone from index.storsys, and the
README does not mention anything new about symbolic links and archives.
I seem to recall that symlinks and archives were going to be revisited
by development; is this correct and does anyone recall when?

An option for 'dsmc archive' like '-symlinkaslink' would be really
handy.  AIX 4.3 html-based documentation has a looped symlink along the
lines of:
/usr/share/html/some/path/with/a/lang/en_US/foo ->
/usr/share/html/some/path
which throws an archive of /usr deep into a neverending loop.

Also, a client of mine has a setup where a number of links cross
filesystems; this causes a archive of one filesystem to cross into other
filesystems, which seems contrary to the spirit of ADSM archives _not_
crossing filesystem boundaries.

Also, I've found the process of scheduled archives difficult at best
because with archives, the filespec is a filespec and not a
filesystemspec (as it is for incremental backup) so it is almost
impossible to have a generic schedule with action=archive, since the
objects depend on the client system.  You pretty well have to write a
script that generates the filespecs and then schedule the script to
run.  If the archive takes a long time, it can then push a subsequent
scheduled incremental back past its window so the latter is missed.

I've found that I have to write a script with artificial intelligence in
it to generate the filespec and wrap it in a wrapper script that runs my
script like a daemon, in the background with a nohup, so that the
scheduler comes back right away and is ready for the later incremental
backup.  If I don't wrap it, then the scheduler starts a session at the
appointed time, starts the script which itself runs one or more sessions
serially, while the scheduler waits for the script to finish.   While
the scheduler is waiting its session with the server is idle and gets
punted, so that in the event log the scheduled script shows up as a
failure.

With my wrapper, on the other hand, the scheduled archive script
(wrapper) always shows up as successful since the success of the
underlying script is decoupled from the success of the wrapper script.
Either always a failure or always successful, regardless of any true
measure of success.


Sigh...

What do you do when faced with this...?

Cheers...
Bruce
--
Bruce Elrick, Ph.D.
Bruce Elrick, Ph.D.
ADSM/AIX/SP Certified