Hi Taketoshi,

On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 08:11, taketoshi ide wrote:

> Our system:
>       TSM SERVER 4.1.2 on IBM AIX 4.3.3   .
>       TSM CLIENT B/A 4.1.2 LINUX on FREEBSD 4.5-RC

> We have problems with backup/restore . It doesn't work for some file
> systems.
>  We used "emulator linux" for freebsd to install tsm client.

This is a known problem with linux backup software running under linux
emulation on FreeBSD.  The emulation environment basically overlays the
/compat/linux directories over / for linux binaries which means the
linux dsmc executable never sees the real /, /usr and /var filesystems.

There is currently no easy solution.

The best solution would be for IBM to produce a client for FreeBSD and
the other BSD systems but I doubt that is going to happen.  The next
best would be for IBM to release the source to a v3 client and let us
port the damn thing over. There would be plenty of people willing to do
that!  But while IBM may have "embraced" linux, there is little
indication they have embraced open source. :(  The current bizarre TSM
licensing doesn't help that either.

Another partial solution is to run the SCO v2 client instead.  It's
ancient but the command line client works under iBCS2 emulation and
since there are no /compat/iBCS2 directories it can see all FreeBSD
filesystems.  The big drawback is a 2Gb file limit which has bitten us
occasionally.  I have this client packaged up as a FreeBSD package if
you want it.

There are others in the FreeBSD community trying to run this client.  At
least one I know has disabled the filesystem mapping entirely (search
the FreeBSD-Stable mailing list at www.freebsd.org).  Not a good
solution for us though.

I've been playing with using a nullfs mount into another filesystem to
attach the 3 problem filesystems and then backing them up indirectly.  A
little nasty but shows promise.  The linux client has been flaky and
difficult to install given it's now packaged as an RPM and the nullfs
filesystem hasn't been too stable but I suspect this is how we'll
finally make it work.

TSM is pretty good. It's a pity IBM haven't realised yet that there are
a lot of sites running FreeBSD that would be happy to pay for TSM
licences if they had a supported client.  More than some of the clients
that they officially support I suspect.


Carl.