we have a server that runs a backup (cron job) at 9:15 every night. When I log on in the morning I have mail message that gives me a long list of all the files that were backed up the night before. For a couple of weeks now, the mail message gives me an empty list. Yet, when I run the same job manually from a #prompt, it runs. I am not able to run this job with cron in the daytime because too many users are in it. I wanted to browse the tape to see if the backup is really failing to copy the files or if they are on the tape and the mail message is bogus.

The job in the crontab is this:
15 21 * * 1-5 cd /usr/rtdhome ; find . -print | cpio -ovcB > /dev/rmt/1

I have tried 'restore -i' for an interactive restore session, but that tries to read /dev/rmt/0 which is an old tape device that's not used. 'restore -i /dev/rmt/1' also wants to look at /dev/rmt/0. How can I get restore -i to read /dev/rmt/1 instead of /0 ?

Since the backkup was done with cpio instead of tar, I'm not sure if I can browse the tape with restore -i anyway.

What would be the best way to browse the tape on /dev/rmt/1 without actually restoring anything ?

This is an ancient DGUX system, not Linux, and I'm not a unix expert I just inherited this server recently, but a lot of things are very similar to Linux and it looked like this might be a good place to ask. Thanks

Well, ignoring the DG-UX bit for the moment, I'd usually check the mailbox for the user running the cron job. If there's an issue with cron, either the cronjob owner or root usually gets an email.
Try

mail

or

mailx

from the cmd line as root and the cronjob owner.
Also look at the log dir (in Linux /var/log...)
Check the default env in cron; usually its minimal, which means you need full absolute paths to cmds/files; not sure about DG-UX.

Thanks Chris. everything is done as root on this machine. Why ? Not sure but that's the way it was setup years ago. The machine is not on the network but users connect via an ancient array of serial cabling and hubs in the building using an old version of procomm - The users use their own usernames and passwords to log in to and run the application and never actually see UNIX. I know I know....as I said, it's an ancient system but it's going away in about 6 months (hopefully). The only mail message root gets is from cron about the backup job and that message is deleted daily. The system commands used (find, cpio are all available to root from anywhere in the file system.) Also - the cron job ran fine forever until about 2 weeks ago.

Mike

Can you find out what changed 2 weeks ago. Can you read the email before being deleted so you can see what's happening . (temp block the delete if you have to).
What about the log files, should be something in there.?