Dan and Bruce,
This was bug #650 and has been fixed in all the OnTap OS releases since 4.3x. The request to delete this snapshot_for_dump.<num> will fail.
-paul
At 08:42 AM 6/25/98 -0500, you wrote:
On 06/25/98 01:38:27 you wrote:
Is it always safe to attempt to delete a snapshot_for_dump.<num>?
Another way to phrase my question -- it will *never* succeed when a dump is in progress, right?
Yes, I know it's supposed to not succeed, but since I'm writing a program to automatically delete snapshots, I'm exercising more paranoia than usual.
Well, there USED to be an old bug that's been around since the beginning that trying to delete one while a dump was in progress would crash the filer. This bug was even mentioned in bold letters in the admin guide (either in the snapshot or the dump sections). Assuming they've fixed it to do what you say, then you're correct.
If they haven't, then you don't want to automatically delete those files, unless you have some way of knowing ahead of time that they are no longer associated with a dump process (say, one that failed in some ungraceful way). Since this usually happened because of a crash, one thing I used to do was include an automatic snap delete at the end of the rc file to delete the snapshot_for_dump after the filer had started up. The appearance of the snapshot_for_dump.n mechanism broke that... I made the suggestion that having the OS automatically delete those might be a good idea, but on the other hand it might not... the user may really want to restart the backup off that old image, rather than taking a new one right at that moment.
Bruce