On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 at 8:56am, Brian Cuttler wrote

> We are very confused this morning.
> 
> This report says "short write", usually I take that to
> mean that we filled up the tape and we probably need to
> perfrom a flush.
> 
> However we have numbers in all the coluns have numbers which
> always indicates to me that we wrote the dumps to tape (well,
> except for one partition that outright failed).
> 
> And the holding area is empty.
> 
> Can you explain what really happened here ?

> FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:
>   newton     /usr4 lev 0 FAILED [out of tape]
>   taper: FATAL syncpipe_get: w: unexpected EOF
>   newton     /usr4 lev 0 FAILED ["data write: Broken pipe"]
>   newton     /usr4 lev 0 FAILED [dump to tape failed]

> newton    /usr4          0   FAILED 
> --------------------------------------------

The messages are a bit misleading -- I agree.  They're also different in 
2.4.2p2.  What happened is that amanda starting dumping newton:/usr4 
straight to tape, since it is too big for your holding disk.  While doing 
this, it hit EOT.  So, it told you that you may need to run amflush if 
there's something on disk (the default when amanda hits EOT).  But, since 
the only partition being dumped was going straight to tape, there's 
nothing to flush.

In short, everything went fine last night *except* that you didn't get a 
backup of newton:/usr4 *at all*.  Amanda will try her best to get that 
tonight.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University