"backup" behavior and corrupted file

[droki]

>>
>> I'm having trouble running "tahoe backup" involving two different
>> issues. First, my backup command keeps getting stuck on a single file.
>> It just hangs on the file.
>>
>> In fact, this behavior isn't limited to "backup", when I run "tahoe
>> check URI:CHK:..." on the URI in question I get the same result - it
>> just hangs.
> 
> We're currently diagnosing a similar issue that a couple of users are
> having with the LeastAuthority.com S4 service. Are you using S4? If
> so, you're another S4 user having this problem, and we could use your
> help investigating it. If not, then this is surprising because I
> thought the bug was in the S4 backend, so if you're having this bug
> *without* using the S4 backend, please let us know!
> 

Hi Zooko, thanks for your response.

I am not a LeastAuthority S4 customer, but I am using the S3 storage
backend. Let me know if I can do anything to help diagnose the issue.

I used 'tahoe debug dump-cap' against the URI:CHK to get the storage
index and found the share that the URI refers to, but I don't know if
there's anything helpful there. Here are the English words that 'cat 0 |
strings' spit out:

codec_name:3:crs,codec_params:8:5881-1-1,crypttext_hash:32:
,crypttext_root_hash:32:
,needed_shares:1:1,num_segments:1:1,segment_size:4:5881,share_root_hash:32:
,size:4:5881,tail_codec_params:8:5881-1-1,total_shares:1:1,

Let me know what else I can do to help debug this.

-droki


>> This brings me to my second issue. I was trying to work around this
>> problem and thought "I'll just make a whole new backup."  So I ran
>> "tahoe backup" and specified a new directory as the destination. But I
>> saw that tahoe was still skipping all the files that had previously been
>> backed up, so it wasn't creating  a new complete backup. Is this the
>> intended behavior?
> 
> Yes, it re-uses the already-uploaded files that are already in the
> Tahoe-LAFS grid. It links to them from the newly created backup. Make
> sense?
> 
>> And, even when specifying a new destination, the backup command got
>> stuck on the same URI.
> 
> Same problem as above. If you're an S4 customer, please send email to
> support at LeastAuthority.com. If not, or even if so, please reply to
> this letter to tahoe-dev. :-)
> 
>> How can I create a totally new backup?
> 
> I don't think it would help to re-upload the files that are already
> successfully in the grid, but if you want that you could rm the backup
> database and next time you ran "tahoe backup" it would reupload them.
> 
> (Then they would get de-duped on the server side, so it wouldn't use
> any more server space after upload.)
> 
> 
>>  What should I think of this bad URI?
> 
> Our current hypothesis is that it is a bug in the S4 backend which is
> somehow data-dependent or sticky so that it applies only to certain
> files, but does to with 100% reproducibility after it gets triggered.
> Daira is investigating right now, so stay tuned, or send us
> information about which S4 account is yours and which file of yours
> hangs to help us debug it.
> 
> Thanks!