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#1 2019-10-18 03:06:40

Tin-Man
Member
Registered: 2019-07-12
Posts: 12

Viewing running backup processes, status and progress

I ran the backup from and SSH session by hand, but I imagine that scheduled ones I'll encounter the same problem. I know the backup is running becasue when I try to run the xsibackup command again it wants to terminate it. So, how do I see the process, it's current status and backup progress? My vmware performance counters show a big drop in disk activity so I'm concerned it's stuck waiting for something or frozen or something like it.

BTW, on my original command arguments, I included STDOUT so that I could see the progress, but got disconnected and now I'm on a whole new SSH session.

Last edited by Tin-Man (2019-10-18 03:08:12)

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#2 2019-10-18 12:12:34

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: Viewing running backup processes, status and progress

If you got disconnected from your SSH session while the process was writing to STDOUT in a TTY then you most probably have a zombie process, as closing the SSH tunnel will not allow the program to run in the background unless otherwise specified by means of nohup command &, so it will be sitting there waiting for nothing.

In some more modern systems, the remote running program may receive a sighup to allow it running in the background after the SSH session dies or a sigkill to terminate it. Nonetheless ESXi offers basic SSH functonality and I am not even sure that you can configure it to workaround this kind of events.

So, redirect your processes output to a file when run from the cron, it's default behaviour. You can inspect what's going on by using tail -f xsibackup.log. Kill any eventually hanged process resulting from any SSH broken session by looking for the process

ps -c | grep xsi

And kill it.

kill -9 PID

And when you run a command through a remote session, use nohup + & while redirecting to the log, or assume that in case your SSH session ends abruptly, your process will just go to "purgatory".

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#3 2019-10-19 02:05:33

Tin-Man
Member
Registered: 2019-07-12
Posts: 12

Re: Viewing running backup processes, status and progress

admin wrote:

If you got disconnected from your SSH session while the process was writing to STDOUT in a TTY then you most probably have a zombie process, as closing the SSH tunnel will not allow the program to run in the background ....

So, redirect your processes output to a file when run from the cron, it's default behaviour. You can inspect what's going on by using tail -f xsibackup.log. Kill any eventually hanged process resulting from any SSH broken session by looking for the process

ps -c | grep xsi

And kill it.

kill -9 PID

And when you run a command through a remote session, use nohup + & while redirecting to the log, or assume that in case your SSH session ends abruptly, your process will just go to "purgatory".

You know what I thought that about the SSH session would end the processes, but to my surprise xsibackup reported it as still running. I did run the PS and grep for xsi but I got no processes back as running so I just assumed there were some other subprocess at work. Why would the xsibackup report the process as still running?

And just a suggestion, maybe it would be nice if the xsibackup executable would give a little more detail when it detects another process running. Maybe provide a PID and heck, while it's at it, might as well provide a progress status in those 30 seconds it's getting ready to terminate. That way I wouldn't have to remember "nohup" or "tail". I don't spend that much time on linux lol. Are you sure ESXi has nohup and tail? I was trying "screen" per someone's suggestion, but appearently esxi didn't have that feature. In face, even better would be running xsibackup with no arguments and have it show running backup satus and progress without terminating anything.

Last edited by Tin-Man (2019-10-19 02:15:28)

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#4 2019-10-19 09:55:24

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: Viewing running backup processes, status and progress

We'll add any feature that we consider to be useful. Thank you for your feedback, we'll take it into account, nonetheless you are working in a "primitive Linux environment", that's a good short description for ESXi as an OS. Yes, you have nohup and tail available in ESXi and those are basic very simple to use command line tools for the Linux sysadmin, if you try to avoid using them you will be limiting your possibilities managing ESXi and any other Linux environment.

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