Solutions to some errors when executing "barman check" during Barman environment setup

Products

• VMware Tanzu Greenplum

Issue/Introduction

Information on Barman (Backup And Recovery Manager) can be found here.

barman check is a useful step to test the functionality and the connection between PostgreSQL and Barman servers before starting to use Barman for backup and restore.

Resolution

This Knowledge Base (KB) article lists some errors that might be encountered when executing the barman check command and the corresponding workarounds.

1. To solve the below error, please check the ownership of /var/lib/barman.

2020-06-25 08:59:06,173 [55043] barman.server ERROR: Check 'directories' failed for server 'postgresql'
        directories: FAILED (/var/lib/barman/postgresql: Permission denied)

2. To solve the below warning, please check the ownership of the log directory which is defined in barman.conf.

2020-06-24 16:25:33,250 [29420] barman.utils WARNING: Failed opening the requested log file. Using standard error instead.

3. The failure below is caused when barman check tries to confirm that archiving is set up correctly by assuming there is actually something in the archive. To workaround this issue, Barman provides a command to force a segment switch.

Wait for the completed WAL to show up and then archive it immediately using the following command: barman switch-xlog --force --archive postgresql

WAL archive: FAILED (please make sure WAL shipping is setup)

4. To solve the below error, we can check if there are any extra files in /var/lib/barman/<your_postgres_server_name>/errors. Remove the files if they are just extra files or not useful anymore.

archiver errors: FAILED (unknown: 2)

5. The error below is caused by the setting "last_backup_maximum_age = 3 DAYS" in barman.conf - this makes it so that if the latest backup is older than 3 days, it will error out.

In this case, there is no backup yet, therefore it will report the following error:

backup maximum age: FAILED (interval provided: 3 days, latest backup age: No available backups)