Hi Guys,

I'm really not that familiar with the concept of pipe files and mkfifo, but I have an Informix backup script that uses it when backing up to the local file system vs a tape drive. Since our local file system is running low on space, we decided to try pointing at a samba mount with way more space.

I created the mount with this line in /etc/fstab:

After mounting with mount -a, I tested writing files with touch, cat, and vi all successfully. However, my backup script is failing when trying to create a file with mkfifo. I recreated the error with this simple test command:

My hunch is that I might need to pass more options to smbmount or something, but like I said, I'm totally new to this pipe business and don't really get why I can write plain text but not a pipe file. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Swill

I don't think a samba mount supports a FIFO. I don't even think there's an option to force them. FIFOs are not meant as a way to store data on a disk, but as a way to enforce local communication. What would happen if the same FIFO be open on two different hosts mounting the same disk space?

You are correct. Since it's a network resource, there are issues to consider with timeouts/dropped connections/etc., so FIFO to a network resource (even NFS), won't work well, if at all.

Thanks for the replies. The pipe file gets created and removed each time the script is run. My understanding is that it serves as a means of transport and/or communication while the data backup (from Informix) is being dumped. The end result is plain tar.gz file.

It sounds like I might need to just open the pipe on the local file system and move the end resul to the samba share afterwards.

Swill

I just confirmed that we have this working with NFS on another site, so it *might* be possible after all. It at least rules out "generic" network resource issues with mkfifo. Maybe smbfs specifically doesn't support FIFO, but I haven't found anything concrete one way or the other.

Will