Dump errors with selinux

[Simon Andrews]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> Simon Andrews wrote:
> 
>>We've used dump/restore for our backups since way back in RH7.x. 
> 
> 
> It's worth noting that Linus Torvalds believes the program to be
> terminally broken:
> http://lwn.net/2001/0503/a/lt-dump.php3
> 
> He writes:
>     So anybody who depends on "dump" getting backups right is already
>     playing russian rulette with their backups.

This is possibly true if used on live filesystems.  However if you 
either take your filesystem offline before dumping it, or just remount 
it read-only for the duration of the dump there is no problem.  With the 
latest Fedora release the filesystems are by default LVM volumes so the 
easy solution is to create a snapshot and dump that.

I still find dump/restore to be a very easy to use backup tool.

I should also note that since reporting this in bugzilla I've been 
contacted by the dump/restore maintainer with a temporary workaround to 
get our backups going again.  He's also provided a test patch to enable 
the selinux attributes to be saved and restored and this functionality 
should make it into a future release.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=142525

Simon.