Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Not always getting all the files over a cifs share

[Andrew Ferguson]

On Jul 11, 2008, at 5:05 PM, Derek Flint wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We're running rdiff-backup 1.1.16 on Ubuntu server 7.10 with a source
> directory that is on mounted windows share and a destination directory
> that is a local ext3 partition.  We're using cifs to mount the windows
> share.

What options are you using? What version of Linux kernel? Windows  
version? What is your network latency like? On your server, what  
version of python? 32 or 64 bit? What does `cat /proc/fs/cifs/ 
DebugData` return? How about /proc/fs/cifs/LookupCacheEnabled and / 
proc/fs/cifs/OplockEnabled ?

> All too often it seems that only a subset of the files on the share  
> are
> found and the backup will only backup those files.  The files it  
> doesn't
> find from previous backups it removes from the mirror.  Are there any
> ideas as to why the backup would only find some of the files on the
> share?  The share itself hasn't changed in these tests.
>
> There doesn't seem to be any error messages indicating something out  
> of
> the ordinary went wrong when the job only gets the subset.  The
> statistics we get from such a job looks like the following.


Here are a few suggestions:

- Run rdiff-backup with a higher verbosity like -v5 to see a list of  
which files it believes have changed. Process the log to see whether  
those files actually exist. Also, with -v5, you will get a debugging  
output at the beginning which tells you which rdiff-backup options  
have automatically been selected (symlink support, escaped characters,  
etc.)

- Do CIFS debugging with the cifsFYI and traceSMB /proc entries. See  
the cifs README or manpage for more information:
        http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/fs/cifs/README?v=linux-2.6
        http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount.cifs

- Did you look over the CIFS entry in the rdiff-backup FAQ? It doesn't  
address this issue, but perhaps one of the issues it does talk about  
rings a bell for you with other problems you have seen:
        http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/FAQ.html#cifs



Andrew