[CentOS] tar bug in CentOS 4.6?

Tue Jan 8 18:00:52 UTC 2008
David G. Miller <dave at davenjudy.org>

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

-- 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce