[ILUG] Problem with dump hanging

[Niall O Broin]

I have two boxes in a colo which are backed up using dump to a tape drive 
attached to one of the boxes. This generally works quite well, but sometimes, 
the dump on the box which doesn't have the tape drive hangs.

This is one of those times - there are 5 dump processes on the tapeless box 
(which dumps to stdout via ssh to the tapeful box) and their current states 
seen with strace are :

[root at lotse root]# strace -p 27004
pause( <unfinished ...>
[root at lotse root]# strace -p 27003
write(1, "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 10240 
<unfinished ...>
[root at lotse root]# strace -p 27002
pause( <unfinished ...>
[root at lotse root]# strace -p 27001
read(7,  <unfinished ...>
[root at lotse root]# strace -p 26992
wait4(-1,  <unfinished ...>
[root at lotse root]# strace -p 26991
select(10, [3 4], [], NULL, NULL <unfinished ...>


Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what might be happening here ?


-- 
Niall