cpbackup failure - permission denied

[bamnet]

I've been getting a few account failures during my system backup for the last few weeks. Its not one consistent account failing each night, but maybe a handful of accounts that seem to rotate in failure... all with similar error messages all related to permissioning. Here's what my backup log says:

Copying homedir..../bin/gtar: ./.rnd: Cannot open: Permission denied
/bin/gtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

and another night...

Copying homedir..../bin/gtar: ./perl: Cannot savedir: Permission denied
/bin/gtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

and again...

Copying homedir..../bin/gtar: ./public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/fresh-page/cache/index.php: Cannot stat: Permission denied
/bin/gtar: ./public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/fresh-page/modules/index.php: Cannot stat: Permission denied
/bin/gtar: ./public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/fresh-page/files_flutter/index.php: Cannot stat: Permission denied
/bin/gtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

All of these error messages are relatively new in nature, starting on 2009-02-21.

Is there anything I can do to prevent the backup of these accounts from failing? Whats strange is that the backup doesn't fail consistently on the same account, but it will never fail on more than one account... maybe just a coincidence.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[mtindor]

They aren't necessarily failing.

See this post: http://forums.cpanel.net/showpost.ph...3&postcount=10

If you do a search you'll see others who reported this "problem" - In reality it is not a problem. Recently the Cpanel folks made it so that items like that which could not be copied were logged - they used to not be logged before.

Those are items that are likely owned by some other user than the Cpanel user who is being backed up. They are probably files owned by 'nobody' or 'apache' or something - something that Apache has written into a directory that the Cpanel user (that is being backed up) does not have access to.

Mike

[bamnet]

That makes sense, its throwing a permission error from tar but moving on.

Is there a way to avoid getting these 'informational' messages from backup sent to me [currently via email]? I would really only like to know if a backup fails, not if the backup has informational messages, like this permission thing, for me or even the log indicating it completed.

[kamm]

This is the way I'm dealing with this:

The entire thread:
http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?t=108537

My solution:
http://forums.cpanel.net/showpost.ph...7&postcount=14

[kamm]

In my case they were all either PHP session files being stored in non-default locations, cache files or other such temporary files.

I guess my situation is easier to control as all accounts are sites developed by us...

[bamnet]

Going through the accounts that fail and excluding the files certainly seems like a solution to the problem, though I would hate to exclude files that were broken now but permissioned fine tomorrow.

[ozace]

so is it simply not backing up that file or is it failing to back up the whole homedir - ie will the backup for all the rest of homedir still happen ?

Jim

[cpanelkenneth]

so is it simply not backing up that file or is it failing to back up the whole homedir - ie will the backup for all the rest of homedir still happen ?

Jim

The message tar outputs, cryptic as it may be, means it cannot access that file. The rest of the files are included in the backup.

I believe we added some filtering of those messages for cPanel 11.25 because they cause needless alarm.

[rwoody]

As I manage directly a large number of accounts on my server - I often time do so when I'm logged in as root. I'm now having a ton of permission errors that are affecting the backups and other functionalities on the server.

Prior to 9/16 - these issues did not present themselves. Now my systems are not backing up properly. There are new tars created but mysql is definitely not backing up and I also am getting the emails that there are permission errors, so certain account backups are failing.

In addition when trying to do normal functions in backend management of some of my web apps, even though the file permissions are set correctly, I am getting errors - example - in using a systems (Joomla) installation for components and modules I now get permission errors (can't move files), when in fact the permissions have been set to 777 for that directory.

How can I correct these ownership permission errors as I'm guessing that is what I'm dealing with or is maybe the question is really - is that the issue and if not what would cause these server wide permission errors.

Thanks in advance

Ruth

[l337ingDisorder]

Going through the accounts that fail and excluding the files certainly seems like a solution to the problem, though I would hate to exclude files that were broken now but permissioned fine tomorrow.

I tend to agree with bamnet on this one. On my system the permission errors are with /home/(user)/smarty/cache and /home/(user)/smarty/templates, both of which should be backed up because they're changing constantly.

So, I don't want to exclude the dirs.

What's more, looking at the dirs they both have 777 permissions, so why would gtar get permission denied? In theory even 'nobody' should have read access.

How can I fix gtar's permission errors while still backing up the given dirs?

Thanks,
Scott