[CentOS] tar bug in CentOS 4.6?

[John Hinton]

David G. Miller wrote:
> Since upgrading my server from CentOS 4.5 to 4.6 I've been getting the
> following error from amanda backups:
>
> mutilate   /home lev 1 FAILED [compress got signal 11, /bin/tar got 
> signal 13]
>
>
> I was away from the house for most of the end of December and had a
> couple of other issues that came up that could have been related but
> apparently weren't (why is it that several things all go wrong at
> once?).  After getting these other issues resolved I was still getting
> the above error.  I tried running the following command as root:
>
> /bin/tar -X /etc/amanda/exclude-list/exclude.txt -cvf - /home | gzip -v
> -c > /share/dave/Home.tar.gz
>
> Initially tar would die while attempting to back up one of IMAP folders
> that had quite a few fairly large e-mails (some pictures my brother had
> sent).  I removed the larger e-mails and tar proceeded past the IMAP
> folder that had been the problem only to die later:
>
> ...
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/2007 Spring/
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/2007 Spring/Mynametemplate.ppt
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/2007 Spring/MyNameSamples.doc
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/2007 Spring/Myname105.ppt
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/2007 Spring/TYP Types.doc
> /home/judy/Judy's Stuff/School/2007 Spring/Photoshop_CS2.exe
> Segmentation fault
>
> The copy of PhotoShop is the trial version that my wife had downloaded
> about a year ago for a class she was taking.  This directory has been
> getting backed up at least every thirty days since then given my tape
> rotation.  If I remove the PhotoShop_CS2.exe file, the backup completes
> normally.
>
> So, is this a tar bug (doesn't like big files now) or is there some
> other issue like available shared memory that's causing the problem?
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
Sounds like your tmp directory isn't big enough to handle the creation
of the tar file. I'm pretty sure it's stored there until it's created
and zipped. Then once done is moved to the destination. If you do a df
from the command line several times while running the script, you can
see if an area is filling up before completion.

John Hinton