Re: Backup to Tape Incomplete

["Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:20 PM, Phillip Smith
<phillip(dot)smith(at)weatherbeeta(dot)com(dot)au> wrote:
>
> > >  Do we think this is a Postgres problem, a Linux problem or a problem
>  > > specific to my hardware setup? Was I wrong to think that I should be
>  > > able to  stream directly from pg_dump to /dev/st0? I would have
>  > > thought it *should*  work, but maybe I was wrong in the first place
>  > > with that?
>  >
>  > If you can dd the file onto your tape drive, then it's some weird
>  interaction between
>  > pg_dump and your system I'd think.  Could the be some maximum size that
>  you can buffer
>  > through pipes / redirects on your machine?
>  >
>  > I'd test to see if cat pgdumpfile.sql > /dev/st0 works or not.  If it
>  fails at the
>  > same approximate size, then it's something to do with redirection.  If >
>  tar works but
>  > redirects fail, then the problem isn't with postgresql.  i.e. do something
>  similar to
>  > what you're doing with pgsql and see which things fail and which ones
>  don't.
>
>  It appears to be me :(
>
>  [postgres(at)stirling ~]$ cat /tmp/dbname080225.sql > /dev/st0
>  cat: write error: Invalid argument
>
>  It ran for a good 30 minutes, then died with that.

I wonder what it's meaning by invalid arg?  Is something in the .sql
file somehow coming across as an argument?  Can you cat the sql file
to /dev/null successfully?