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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer-- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE (a $49 USD value)! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! Download using promo code Free_Logger_4_Dev2Dev. Offer expires February 28th, so secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsight-sfd2d _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list Bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel