CPIO, RFS, & Crontab ??

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <3813 at wb3ffv.ampr.org> howardl at wb3ffv.ampr.org ( WB3FFV) writes:
>machines together.  The machines seem to work fine untill you try and
>cpio somthing across the RFS mounted file systems, and then bang, one of
>the servers will panic.  As long as they don't use cpio over RFS all is 

There *shouldn't* be a problem with using cpio over RFS file systems, but 
I don't have an RFS setup handy to test it.  I would say that the RFS
implementation has a serious bug if using CPIO causes a panic.  

How about more info on the problem like what cpio command, and which
end of the RFS panics (the client or the server), whether the output of
the cpio is going to yet another RFS partition, etc.

>on the net aware of such a limitation within CPIO ??  If there is such a 
>limitation, would using AFIO make any difference??

I would try it.  I can't think of any reason that CPIO would cause a problem
where AFIO wouldn't, but who knows?

>The next interesting thing they were told is that you can't use CPIO from
>inside cron, as cpio has a timout builtin, and that if it runs to the end of
>tape for some reason, it will timeout and abort.  My question is, is anyone

Actually the timeout doesn't matter.  You can't use CPIO from within cron
if the cpio may take more than one volume because the standard input for 
a cron job is /dev/null, so cpio will never get a response for loading the
second volume.  If you want the CPIO to run from cron, you have to ensure
that it only takes one volume.

-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.
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