386/ix User-level Performance??

[Marco S Hyman]

In article <9273 at attctc.Dallas.TX.US> cassidy at attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Cassidy Lynar) writes:
> In article <6750 at stiatl.UUCP> john at stiatl.UUCP (John DeArmond) writes:
> >
> >The backup script was broken - I forget the problem, someone else here fixed 
> >that one.  The sysadmin scripts are close but no cigar.  One must still do 
> >administration manually because not all necessary functions are included.  
> 
> 	I think that if you were to purchase the upgrade to 2.0.2 you will
> find the these things are fixxed, and work very well.

After upgrading to 2.0.2 backup was still broken.  At approx line 258 of
/usr/bin/backup there is an extraneous line ``done >/tmp/FILE$$'' that needs
to be removed.  Also, the backup script has a design flaw.  If the first
full backup is done after generating a new /unix only the files modifies
since the /unix was generated are saved!

When run without being told what device to use backup, contrary to
the comments at the start of the file, selects either /dev/rdsk/f0 or
/dev/rdsk/f1.  I haven't been able to find a reference to these names in the
documentation (although the names are obvious).  What is surprising is that
the default setup for those devices is not what one would expect.

crw-rw-rw-   1 root     sys        1,  4 May 22 09:50 /dev/rdsk/f0
crw-rw-rw-   1 root     sys        1,133 May  8 15:15 /dev/rdsk/f1

I would expect f0 to be 1,0 not 1,4 and I haven't found any reference to
minor type 133 in Interactive's documentation.

Makes one think strongly about using GNU tar for backups.
And that brings up a question.  What _technical_ reasons, if any, are there
for using cpio over tar or vice versa.  I'm sure this question has started
wars in the past but I haven't seen anything for quite a while.

--marc
-- 
// Marco S. Hyman		{ames,pyramid,sun}!pacbell!dumbcat!marc