On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 01:48:28PM -0700, Joe Rhett wrote:
> >On 8/30/05, Joe Rhett <jrhett AT meer DOT net> wrote:
> >>tracking ability, but let's use 3 tapes and write not a single byte to
> >>them?
> 
> On Aug 30, 2005, at 1:18 PM, Cam wrote:
> > What's retarded? your configuration? you really didn't give enough 
> >information for anyone to help you.
> 
> We've been running in this configuration for 5+ years now.  The 
> configuration works.

And not using samba, right Joe :))


> ... .  Yes, I could supply the configuration but it 
> really doesn't change anything.  Amanda should not use 3 tapes and 
> write 0 bytes to them, no matter what the configuration is.
> 

Couple of items from your original post.

>The dumps were flushed to tapes svk17, svk18, svk19.
>The next 7 tapes Amanda expects to used are: svk20, svk21, svk01,
>svk02, svk03, svk04, svk05.

Looks like runtapes is 7.

>Output Size (meg)           0.0        0.0        0.0

Nothing made it to any holding disk.

>  taper: tape svk17 kb 34286880 fm 1 writing file: short write
>  taper: retrying customer-plat1:/.1 on new tape: [writing file: short
>write]
>  taper: tape svk18 kb 34227328 fm 1 writing file: short write
>  taper: retrying customer-plat1:/.1 on new tape: [writing file: short
>write]
>  taper: tape svk19 kb 0 fm 0 [OK]

This looks like the dump was going directly to tape and was too large to
fit your 35GB tape.  So it was retried and of course was still too big.

>  customer- / lev 1 FAILED 20050825 [too many taper retries]

This seems to be an improvement over what I would have expected.
I recall amanda continuing through any and all runtapes tapes.
It would have done 7 attempts in your config.  At least now it
stops after a couple of attempts.

As to whether amanda's behavior is reasonable, well ...

It is nearly impossible, perhaps totally impossible, to tell if the taping
failed because of reaching the end of the tape or a tape or hardware error.
Is having a backup important enough to continue and try again or should the
first failure, possibly a bad/worn out tape terminate all the remaining backups?

I don't think there is a simple answer.  What would be your recommendation?

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
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