Re: tarsnap warning on reading extended attributes

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

Hi Daniel (& list),

On 01/18/16 19:05, Daniel LaFlamme wrote:
> I am running tarsnap in a jail. I have it working, but my logs have lots of
> lines like the following:
> 
> Jan 17 16:37:01 tarsnap tarsnap: Backing up /mnt/git...
> Jan 17 16:42:33 tarsnap tarsnap: Failed to back up "mnt/git"! (tarsnap:
> Couldn't list extended attributes: Permission denied
> Jan 17 16:42:33 tarsnap tarsnap: tarsnap: Couldn't list extended
> attributesCouldn't list extended attributes: Permission denied
> ...
> Jan 17 16:42:33 tarsnap tarsnap: tarsnap: Couldn't list extended
> attributesCouldn't list extended attributesCouldn't list extended
> attributesCouldn't list extended attributesCouldn't list extended
> ...
> 
> A few questions:
>   - why is it trying to read extended attributes?

Because tarsnap tries to back up everything it can.

>   - why is the formatting of the message strange? Looks like there is a
> missing newline.

When multiple errors occur, they get concatenated.  There's a bug which is
making them not get erased when they get printed, so instead they keep on
accumulating.

>   - what is the recommended way to resolve this?

That's an interesting question.  Best idea I can come up with is to simply
ignore the errors.

> I am on FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE-p28 using the tarsnap-1.0.36 binary package.
> 
> I thought there was something wrong with my jail setup, but apparently the
> inability to read extended attributes in the system name space is well-known.
> See http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-jail/2012-May/001877.html.

I'm a bit torn here -- from one perspective, it makes sense to figure out
which (system) extended attributes we won't be able to read and skip them;
but from another, the user asked to archive these files and we shouldn't
silently drop extended attributes...

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid