CPIO, RFS, & Crontab ??

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <3813 at wb3ffv.ampr.org> howardl at wb3ffv.ampr.org ( WB3FFV) writes:
>
>   Hello Everybody,
>
>I was just asked a question earlier today that I tought was worth bringing
>to the net.  I have a customer that is using RFS under AT&T V/386 Release
>3.2.2 with the new StarGroup LanManager server package to link several 
>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 
>OK, and if they do use cpio it will die everytime with no questions asked.

I use cpio over RFS all the time, but I execute it from the machine
with the tape drive reading the files across the RFS mount.  Are they
writing to the tape device across the RFS mount?  (That should work
as well as long as all machines have the same byte ordering and the
same release of the device driver, but it's always been too slow to suit me).

>They were talking with the vendor they got the equiptment and they vendor
>claims that you CAN NOT use CPIO over RFS, and they asked if I was aware
>(or in agreement) with this.  I didn't really know how to answer this other
>than to say I had never been informed of such a problem.  Is anybody here
>on the net aware of such a limitation within CPIO ??  If there is such a 
>limitation, would using AFIO make any difference??

It's a pretty silly concept if they are talking about reading the
files across RFS. Cpio has to use the open(), read(), etc.,
system calls just like everybody else.  If those system calls don't
work for cpio, how can they work properly elsewhere?

>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
>on the net aware of an inactivity timer in CRON or CPIO ?? 

No, but the newer versions will detect end-of-media and prompt for a
change by opening /dev/tty.  Running from cron you are limited to a
single tape.

If you have something resembling rsh (remote, not restricted, shell)
which SysVr3 unfortunately doesn't, you can use afio to talk to
a remote copy of itself for backups to remote devices.  Hmmm... It
probably wouldn't be difficult at all to modify afio to talk across
starlan.  Just add a service with nlsadmin that starts afio with the
undocumented -I or -O options and either add the code to request the
connection directly to afio or make another program to set up the
link and pass the data on a pipe.

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us