Brian Cuttler wrote:
> Hello amanda users,
> 
> I'm running an old version of amanda 2.4 on a Solaris 9 system
> with a Solaris 8 client.
> 
> Its come to my attention that the two larger client partitions
> are not being moved through the work area but are being written
> directly to tape.
> 
> The work area is a 70 Gig partition, the client DLEs are on 35 Gig
> partitions. I'd expect to use the work area even if they did so
> sequentially, the partitions however are only about 70% occupied,
> aprox 24 Gig each, so ideally I'd have liked to have seen some
> parallelism.
> 
> From the daily reports I see that the smaller client partitions
> on both the Solaris 8 and 9 machine (the amanda server does have
> itself as a client) do utilize the work area.
> 
> I do not know what is preventing the work area from being used.
> I would add more work area if I thought it would help, but I don't
> see anything screaming "work area capacity" issue.

If the direct-to-tape DLEs are level 0s, look at the 'reserve' option.
It tells amanda what percentage of your holdingdisk to save for use by
incrementals, so in case of tape problems you can run longer because
you don't fill it up with fulls. I don't remember what it defaults to
if not specified, but I think it is most of the space.

> 
> Here is a question, I assume chunksize appeared around the same
> time (if not actually with) the ability to split a single DLE
> across multiple work areas. I see it back in the docs into '98
> or more but I'm not sure when it first appeared. Is there a list
> of what version which features where added, other than the changelog
> installation file ?

Chunksize was a workaround for writing dumps to disk larger than the
system's max file size (which was 2GB on many machines at the time).
I think support for multiple holding disks was added later.

Frank

> 
> Anyway it doesn't look like a work area capacity issue. What, other
> than adding chunksize to my amanda.conf and perhaps adding additional
> work area can I do to investigate this issue.
> 
> There does not seem to be any output in the /tmp/amanda/* files
> showing which DLEs will be work area and which will not, where else
> can I look for an explaintation/solution to this issue ?
> 
>                                               thank you,
> 
>                                               Brian
> ---
>    Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
>    Computer Systems Support        (v) 518 486-1697
>    Wadsworth Center                (f) 518 473-6384
>    NYS Department of Health        Help Desk 518 473-0773
> 


-- 
Frank Smith                                      fsmith AT hoovers DOT com
Sr. Systems Administrator                       Voice: 512-374-4673
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