[Box Backup] Troubleshooting a 0.10

[Damien B]

Chris Wilson wrote:
> I'm just wondering why you didn't spot these error messages in your logs?
> 
>> Aug 28 00:10:25 ns29253 bbackupd[25191]: Backup object failed, error when
>> reading /var/named/run-root/proc/acpi/event
>> Aug 28 00:10:25 ns29253 bbackupd[25191]: Error code when uploading was (1/2),
>> Common OSFileOpenError (Can't open a file -- attempted to load a non-existant
>> config file or bad file referenced within?)

I think it's a combination of several factors.
At first, logging was not activated at all for bbackupd (instructions 
present to change syslog.conf in the wiki, but not on the mainly 
referenced page: http://www.boxbackup.org/client.html ).
Then with logging activated my obvious behaviour is to "tail -f", which 
"doesn't work" with that kind of background process.
I think I didn't really looked much further, and then I *decided* it was 
a directory filtering problem, so I focused on activating specific 
debugging options for that problem.


> Is there anything you can suggest that we can do to make these errors 
> clearer or encourage people to check their logs and investigate problems 
> like this?

First place I went was the http://www.boxbackup.org/trouble.html page, 
which starts with "Unfortunately, the error messages are not 
particularly helpful at the moment.", which kind of discourage looking 
for error messages at all :) One thing which would be helpful on that 
page is IMHO those three things:
- point to the activation of logging on the storage client
- point to the activation of logging on the storage server
- give some kind of command line to look for errors like
grep bbackupd /var/log/messages | egrep "\([[:digit:]]+/[[:digit:]]+"
(which is not cross-platform I know)

Damien