[Lustre-discuss] gnu tar usage

[Dilger, Andreas]

On Oct 31, 2012, at 10:55 AM, Jason Brooks wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am using lustre 1.8.6, on a centos 5.5 system.  
> 
> The installed version of tar (gnu, 1.15.1) is out of the centos RPM.  The man page claims that use of the —xattrs commandline option will get all of the filesystem's extended attributes.
> 
> My question: will it get the extended attributes of ldiskfs filesystems and of lustre filesystems?
> 
> In other words, has tar gotten to the point that it really can be used as a backup method?

The version of GNU tar that shipped with RHEL5/CentOS5 did not include the changes necessary to back up the Lustre-specific layout xattrs.  It is of course fine for backup/restore of the file data itself.

For RHEL5/CentOS5 you need to build the lustre-patched version of tar-1.19 that restores the xattrs on the newly-created file before it is opened.  You can download the .src.rpm and build it for your distro at http://downloads.whamcloud.com/pub/downloads/tools/lustre-tar/

For RHEL6 you do not need to build your own RPM, since the Lustre functionality is included into that version.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Software Architect
Intel Corporation