Agile Central - On-Premises: Backups Failing

Products

• Rally On-Premise
• Rally SaaS

Issue/Introduction

The backups for the CA Agile Central On-Premises appliance are failing.

Looking at the /home/appuser/rally_backup.log file shows the following entry:

<strong>Backup Status:</strong>
<br /><strong>Step 1 of 6 - Rotating Backup logs in /home/appuser</strong>
<br /><strong>Step 2 of 6 - Testing connection to FTP server: rallyftp - ftp://<YOUR_IP_ADDRESS>/</strong>
<br />Using Username/Password
---- Connecting to 10.40.41.134 (10.40.41.134) port 21
FTP server connection successful - continuing
<br /><strong>Step 3 of 6 - Beginning backup</strong>
/etc/profile: line 37: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/profile: line 59: /dev/null: Permission denied
LRM-00104: 'ERROR:' is not a legal integer for 'flashback_scn'

rm: cannot remove `/home/oracle/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db/rdbms/log/almci-master-19067-2018-08-21-22-00-02-dp*': No such file or directory
<br /><strong>Backup Failed!</strong><br />There was an error with the database backup - Exiting backup

Environment

Release:
Component: ACPREM

Cause

This can occur if the /dev/null device file has become corrupted or if access to /dev has been restricted.

Perform the following actions to troubleshoot /dev and /dev/null:
Check the contents of /dev/null

cat /dev/null 

It should be empty, but if it returns data it could be an indication that someone or something copied a file in place of /dev/null instead of piping data out to /dev/null 

Verify /dev/null file properties

ls -l /dev/null 

Output should be as follows: 

crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Apr 18 01:34 /dev/null 

Verify /dev permissions

ls -dl dev

Output should be as follows:

drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 3180 Aug 23 10:26 dev

Resolution

There are two potential solutions to fix /dev/null:

• Reboot the system. The /dev/null file will be recreated during startup 
• Execute the following command: 

rm -f /dev/null; mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3

If the permissions on /dev are incorrect, run the following commands:

chmod a+x /dev
chmod a+r /dev