TMF Planning and Configuration Guide (H06.05+)

Configuring TMF for Backup and Recovery
HP NonStop TMF Planning and Configuration Guide—540136-002
5-5
Managing Audit Dumps
Dumping audit-trail files on a regular basis is the best way to keep audit trails from
overflowing, and it secures your database in case of a system or media failure.
There are two major strategies for managing audit dumps to tape:
1. Configure TMF to automatically perform audit dumps, keeping the automatic audit
dump feature enabled at all times.
2. Manually force audit dumps to occur when you choose, by pausing (disabling) the
automatic audit dump feature and resuming (reenabling) it when ready.
With the first strategy, dumps will occur when they are requested by the audit dump
process. This strategy is simple and works regardless of the rate at which your
application generates audit information. It requires, however, that an operator watch
for and respond to requests to mount tapes.
If you have a cartridge-type tape drive, consider having your operators mount all TMF-
labeled scratch tapes that will be needed for audit dumps at the beginning of the day:
this way, the operators do not have to be available to watch for tape mount requests
whenever an audit dump is needed. The operators should still, however, check the
audit dump status periodically throughout the day. If they do not mount a TMF-labeled
scratch tape in response to a mount request, the request remains active and the
associated audit dump does not occur.
The second strategy allows you to control when audit dumps occur and perform them
at a regularly scheduled time of day. This strategy works only if your system generates
audit records at a rate that does not use all of the disk space on the audit-trail volumes.
To control when audit dumps occur, you use the DISABLE AUDITDUMP command to
disable audit dumping until the scheduled times. At the scheduled times, use the
ENABLE AUDITDUMP command to start the audit dump process.
If your system generates an extremely small amount of audit information, you can use
a different strategy to control both audit-trail rollovers and audit dumps. You can
configure the audit-trail files to be sufficiently large so that they seldom become full.
Then, you can use the NEXT AUDITTRAIL command periodically to cause an audit-
trail file rollover and an audit dump to occur.
Caution. To control when audit dumps occur, you must disable and enable audit dumping, but
you should always leave the audit dumping feature on. Do not turn off the audit dump attribute
for an audit trail unless you no longer want to retain audit-trail files for possible TMF recovery
operations.