[foxboro] Potential problems with recomended new Foxboro backup procedure

An advisory went out fairly recently that dresses something that has been
of concern to me for a while. It basically said that to do a good backup, one
should take the machine all the way down to the firmware (OK) prompt, and 
come back up with a "boot -s". 

All of this  is IMHO god, as the Foxboro supplied K100 script does not
shutdown everything that I think should be down to have a quiescent system
for backup.

However, there may be an issue with the way the suggest doing this. They
suggest doing a "shutdown" from the graphics, and then doing an "init 0". In
my opinion this should be a "sync; sync halt" sequence

We got burned by this Friday when an AW51B was taken down for backup. After
bringing it back up the legacy historian would not run. Looking around, it
became apparent that Informix was not working. 

It turns out that this machine has had the historian size increase to 200
points, and that in doing so, more tablespace was required, This tablespace
was added, not as a larger raw partition, or an additional raw partition, but
by adding a file in the filesystem. Specifically in
/opt/fox/hstoian/bin/COOKED, which is the Foxboro recommended way of doing
this.

When the engineer doing the backup did the shutdown, he noticed a warning
message about file(s) on the /opt partition being still in used. Remember
he had already run the K100 script as a part of the shutdown at this point,
but it appears that this does not shutdown Informix.

Has anyone else seen this behavior?

I believe that "halt" would have closed this file properly, whereas "init 0"
does not.

Anyone know for certain?

 
 
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