Over the past few months, I’ve had three different instances where customers reported to me that dbcopy was moving their files from the source location to the destination location.  Since there is actually no specific switch in dbcopy to request a move, I was baffled.  However, Novell has now figured out what the issue is!

If you run dbcopy with the -h switch, you see this particular listing:

-l             Performs the GWCheck function of storelowercase only

When migrating to Linux, of course we want two things to happen:  we want to migrate all files over converting them to lowercase, and when it’s over, we want a GWCHECK run that checks the guardian database (ngwguard.db) to ensure that this database also lists all files as lowercase.  It is rare that an admin should need to run storelowercase on his/her own.  A successful run of the -m switch against a post office includes the command to run the storelowercase, and so unless something goes wrong during the copy, it’s unlikely that this switch should need to be run manually.  That said, because admins often run dbcopy -h to see what’s there, and see that lovely -l switch, it’s not totally surprising that some misunderstand the usage of this switch and decide to run the dbcopy with both -m and -l at the same time.

So, here’s the problem.  A dbcopy with the -l switch should be run like this:

dbcopy -l -p <path to post office>

A general dbcopy to copy the post office in a migration typically looks like this:

dbcopy -m <source path> <destination path>

The dbcopy -l switch is designed to scan the post office directory to make sure all files are lowercase and then perform a gwcheck storelowercase operation at the end. During this process, there is actually some renaming and manipulation of the files in the post office, and when the -l switch is presented with both a source and destination path, it gets confused. At the end of the processing of the file, rather than putting the file back in the source directory, dbcopy errantly puts the file into the target directory.

When the 8.02 dbcopy ships, there will be a warning flag if someone attempts to run these two switches together.  In the meantime, well just DON’T DO IT!

A TID is in the process of being created now, and when it is ready I will update here!

Danita