It was a client backing up over the network to the master server I was
particularly interested in (Gigabit all the way). But all backups
which were active at the time just .... stopped... for a while, then
continued on their merry way.. There were no obvious problems in the
logs other than the messages I posted below.

Everything has been fine since.

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:14 PM, Marianne Van Den Berg
<mvdberg AT stortech.co DOT za> wrote:
> What exactly is freezing up? Master server, media server or client?
>
> Are backups being sent across the network? Any firewalls? Anybody
> monitoring network throughput? Firewall timeouts?
> What's in the media server's bptm and bpbrm logs? What's in the client's
> dbclient log?
>
> NetBackup gets blamed way too often for environmental problems... Trust
> NetBackup to troubleshoot your entire environment!!
>
> Regards
>
> M.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Dean
> Sent: 17 October 2008 12:55
> To: List Veritas List
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Curse you NetBackup.
>
> I am sitting here at home on a Friday night watching the backups run
> (yeah, I have no life), trying to get an idea about how the
> performance is going, and trying to help a DBA narrow down a
> performance problem. I have 3 backups running at the moment (things
> haven't really kicked off yet). Everything was going fine - I was
> seeing 60 MB/sec from the main client I am interested in, and about 20
> MB/sec from the other two, which is all good.
>
> Then suddenly everything freezes. It has been about half an hour and
> nothing has happened.
>
> The only error message I see is this one....
>
> 1224235829 1 2 16 melrhnbu02 0 0 0 *NULL* bptm Error occurred during
> initialization.  Could not read logging configuration file.
>
> (that is from a media server which is not involved in the particular
> backup I am intersted in, so is probably completely irrelevant)
>
> I also get lots of this :
> bpcd/log.101708:07:43:53.526 [4941] <16> bpcd main: char_count = 7375,
> .line_count = 55
> bpcd/log.101708:07:43:57.112 [4954] <16> bpcd main: strlen(pProcList) =
> 7205
>
> GRRRR
>
> It;s extremely frustrating having watched a 100GB filesystem backup
> tick up to about 90GB completed at 60 MB/sec, then everything freezes,
> when I have a DBA waiting for me to tell him that everything looks OK
> from the I/O side of things on his server. But I can't give him a
> definitive answer, because EVERYTHING has locked up for me, from all 3
> clients that are trying to backup at the moment.
>
> Oh NetBackup, why must thou smite me?
>
> Well, I was just about to send this email, and things have suddenly
> started moving again. That's life with NBU, I guess. I should be used
> to these mysterious lock-ups by now. But it's extremely frustrating,
> especially when you're trying to do an I/O performance test.
>
> So, I guess I'll have to report to the DBA, the first 4 x 20GB
> fragments ran at 60 MB/sec, but the last 20GB fragment ran at less
> than 1 MB/sec. What is he going to make of that?
>
> NBU 6.5.2 on RHEL 4. Generally it's pretty stable for me, but random
> lock ups like this continue to occur, as they have since I started
> with NBU in the 3.4 days.
>
> Gehhh, just getting out my frustrations. Thanks for listening.
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
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