On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 04:25:14AM +0100, Palle Girgensohn wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> One of the machines we backup is on a different network, so I've set it up 
> with amanda just like all our local machines, and instead of dump I used 
> tar and created a list of the most important files.
> 
> Problem is, almost everytime it fails.
> 
> A full backup is supposed to take around 3:50 hours to transfer on the 2 
> megabit network connection. This is what amstatus says, and it is correct. 
> Only after a couple of hours the backups becomes slower and slower, until 
> it finally halts completely. Sometimes sooner than other times, but it very 
> seldom succeeds (it has happened).
> 
> I've run this backup for a while just to see if it would improve, and 
> fiddled with the settings over and over, but nothing seems to help.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 

This doesn't address any root cause of your problem,
but may be a workaround.

If you are not doing full backups every time, ie, you are
allowing incrementals, consider splitting up the DLE into
multiple DLEs.  The technique has been discussed here
MANY times as a solution to DLEs too large to fit on a
single tape and is described in the amanda docs.

The advantage is that rather than each level 0 being a huge
3.5 hr marathon, you could split that among several (say 4 to 8)
smaller chunks under /usr/local/www/server.  Only one or two
would get level 0's on any one amdump.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)