On Monday 24 January 2011 19:38:28 Alan Brown wrote:
> Is there a document somewhere which describes the exact sequence of
> operations when a tape is written to?

No.

>
> In particular: does Bacula lock the drive while writing/despooling is
> taking place and then unlock immediately it's finished?

No, if I remember right once the tape is mounted, Bacula locks it.  It is 
unlocked only when Bacula releases the drive.

>
> I'm chasing a problem with HP LTO drives (first LTO2 and now LTO5) in
> Overland NEO changers where after a while the drives refuse to eject tapes.
>
> Taking Bacula offline, I tend to find that the changer is reporting that
>   "permit media removal" (lock) is set.
>
> Tapeinfo has no useful diagnostic indicating the drive is locked or not.
>
> "mt lock/unlock" has no effect and "mt unload" or "mt eject" result in
> i/o errors.
>
> Occasionally I get lucky and find that if I mount and re-release the
> drive while Bacula is running, the tape is freed up, but more usually
> the only way out is to power cycle the drive - and because it's in a
> changer that means power cycling  the whole library enclosure, which in
> turn means stopping all running backups, etc....
>
> Has anyone else seen this behaviour? Has anyone been able to reliably
> reproduce it? (It generally takes about 2 weeks to start manifesting here).
>
> I'm of the opinion that this is a tape drive firmware bug but until I
> can find a reproducer it will be impossible to get fixed.

Yes, if it takes several weeks to reproduce, it seems much more likely that it 
is a firmware problem.

>
> Overland and HP both say I'm the first person to ever report this
> behaviour - and both of them deny any support for Bacula in their
> compatibilty matrixes. (their arguments are the usual "nobody is using
> Bacula" thing....)

Typical, but one day it will change.  Bacula is certified to work with Quantum 
the others will come with time ...

Kern

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