Hi Stefan,

Yes - I agree with you that the issues where hw/scsi related, well 85 %,
the other 15 % being blocksize issues which where HW/SW related.

I went into this with drive problems in mind, the assumption being
that it wasn't an issue with Amanda itself but with the (correct)
assumption that the expertise available within the amanda user's
community would help me pinpoint/diagnose/articulate the issues.

To re-itterate, Amanda was the one piece of this puzzle that worked
flawlessly throught. It was with the assistance of the amanda community
that I was able to work out the (HW/SCSI/OS) issues and resolve the
non-amanda problems.

I have since created a file to set the blocksize on the drive at boot
/etc/rc2.d/S99fix-tape (IRIX doesn't have any files in the rc3.d/
directory, it seems to live multiuser at level 2 as far as I can tell).
[Ah, # man init, 2 is multiuser, 3 starts file sharing and other daemons.]

I have restored the more complete disklist, just in time for the
weekend to pick up the 'new' partitions and run them at level 0.

I still have to modify the crontab to restore amdump to 5/week, it
was left at 2per to allow a couple of small DLEs so I didn't forget
where the pieces where. This will wait until the weekend job finishes,
it may take a couple of days.

My thanks and apreciation to everyone that helped with the process.

                                                Brian

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 11:28:49PM +0200, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> Hi, Brian,
> 
> on Freitag, 01. April 2005 you wrote to amanda-users:
> 
> > Anyway - it seems to work and I am able to use amrestore to pull
> > a DLE back from tape to disk. For the first time/finally.
> 
> I am very happy to hear that, Brian!
> 
> >> Did you try a variable block size tape device, ie tps7d4nrnsv
> 
> BC> No, I hadn't but as soon as I transmitted the message I realized
> BC> that it wasn't an xfsdump problem either.
> 
> BC> The DLE I was trying to read used a dump type of TAR rather than DUMP,
> BC> once I tried to read the tar file with tar it worked perfectly.
> 
> Good.
> 
> BC> The second test was to read a second partition, one that was written
> BC> with DUMP, with dump as the reading utility, that also worked.
> 
> Even better.
> 
> BC> Now I just need to put the setblksz in the system boot as we should
> BC> be all set. That and repopulate the disklist which I trimmed during
> BC> the previous weeks of testing.
> 
> Sounds like "minor cleanup-tasks" to me right now.
> 
> Do you agree with me when I sum up your whole odyssey as
> "hardware-issues" or "scsi-related"?
> 
> best regards,
> Stefan
> 
> Stefan G. Weichinger
> mailto:monitor AT oops.co DOT at
> 
> 
> 
> 
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   Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
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