A couple of days ago I was writing about tape labeling problems. At that time it looked to me, that the problem was related to using my new autochanger. Now, after some more debugging, I think the problem exists also with a single drive, but the key factor is that the tape must be totally empty (eg. brand new). As a workaround, writing an eof to the beginning of the tape fixes the problem.
Originally, I was trying to label brand new tapes in autochanger: *label barcodes <clip> 3912 Failed to label Volume: ERR=dev.c:678 Rewind error on "VXA320" (/dev/nst0). ERR=Input/output error. This took about 5 minutes per tape, most of the time the drive just keeps displaying "ready". No tape access during the last 4 minutes... If I do the following (for each tape) # mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind # mt -f /dev/nst0 weof and then run "label barcodes" again, labeling works without any errors, with one tape it takes about 1 minute (~30 s to load a tape etc). So, this takes much less than the timeout of 5 minutes above. I tried to check the documentation, if it says that the tape should start with an eof before labeling, but I couldn't find any note like that. Of course, if there are no other hidden problems in labeling, the easiest way would be to change documentation to require the eof. Finally, I re-installed my old Exabyte VXA-2 drive, that I'd been using for a couple of years: *label <clip> block.c:944 Read error at file:blk 0:0 on device "VXA2" (/dev/nst0). ERR=Input/output error. 3000 OK label. Volume=Testxx Device="VXA2" (/dev/nst0) Catalog record for Volume "Testxx", Slot 0 successfully created. Requesting to mount VXA2 ... 3001 Device "VXA2" (/dev/nst0) is mounted with Volume "Testxx" * So, it looks now that a similar problem appears with the old drive too, but now the tape gets labeled anyway. It's been at least half a year since I've used it to label new tapes either, so could it be possible that the newest Bacula releases expect more what they should find from the tape before labeling it? Both of the drives above were now attached to 1.38.10-3, on FC4 (same system, just a conf change). It may have been as old as 1.36.3 that I've been using last time, when labeling ran ok, with no errors at all (as far as I can remember). Yes, this may be something Exabyte-spesific problem, but at least I think labeling used to work with the same hardware some time ago. Ps. I've also tried labeling with 1 tape at a time in the autochanger, using "label" instead of "label barcodes". It then works in the similar way like in the single drive: error message, but tape gets labeled anyway. Regards, Timo Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
