Hi, On 3/6/2007 3:47 PM, Brian Debelius wrote: ... possible problems with end-of-tape detection with a VXA drive... > Hi, > > OS is Windows 2003r2 > Bacula is v2.0.2 (director and sd are on Windows)
Oh, windows... perhaps something to take to the developer list, too. In any case, when you encounter serious problems with the windows versions, try to contact Rober Nelson, too. > Tape is a VXA-172 (its the same as a VXA-320, just a firmware change to > handicap it to half capacity) Ok. Perhaps someone else has a working config for these drives, so that you could compare your settings? > I get these state errors occasionally, and can't figure out why. In that case I'd guess the pre-end-of-tape notifications come too shortly before the actual end of tape, so that sometimes the last block Bacula writes only just fits onto the tape. Or something :-) > So, Why does the test say that it failed with the EOF write, but then at > the end, say that it was able to read the block, and that the test passed. Because the end-of-tape condition does not definitely indicate that data could not be written. Rather, the tape drive thus indicates that it's quite sure the tape will be at the end really soon. I can't explain it much better, but looking through the unix manual pages for the tape interfaces, that's what I distilled out of it once. The problem is that a tape drive can't know for sure when exactly a tape will be full. That, and large blocks of data to write suggest the strategy to report a nearing end of tape condition before data can not be writen anymore. Thus, a last block can be written to tape, but the write returns an error because the tape drive then is really sure it can't put more data onto the tape, and the final EOF mark either will not be written at all or returns the error state "just in case". This is the reason for Bacula checking the last block. When that check is ok, it's not really a problem there is no filemark at the end of tape because Bacula will never try to read beyond that tape position. I hope that helps, and I hope I've got this more or less right, and finally I hope windows handles tape drives similar :-) Arno > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT > Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your > opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash > http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV > _______________________________________________ > Bacula-users mailing list > Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users -- IT-Service Lehmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arno Lehmann http://www.its-lehmann.de ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
