This is a short one. On Friday I wrestled for a while with my new backup solution using Bacula. I’m trying to write the backups to file on a daily basis and then migrate the weeklies to tape. This should make our backups a lot faster and more reliable, with any luck. The file store is Glory, one of our NetApps, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Bacula refused to write files of larger than 2GB in size. This is important I believe (although I’m not yet entirely sure) because in order to migrate the tapes I need the volumes to be of the same size.

Anyway, as one might guess, the problem was with NFS version 2. Standard NFS v2 doesn’t support file sizes > 2GB, but I thought we were running v3 so it took me an exceptionally long time to discover this. Try mounting with -o vers=3 option, and if you get a strange failure, it means your NetApp is not setup to support v3. In FilerView go to NFS configuration and enable v3, but you’ll find the same problem. While the web interface claims the change has been made, in reality NFS is not automatically restarted and needs to be. I wasn’t sure how to do this over the web but SSH to the rescue and a simple nfs off and nfs on saved the day.