On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 29 December 2005 05:03, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> >On Wed, 28 Dec 2005, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> On Wednesday 28 December 2005 11:25, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> >> >Is anyone else using vtapes with runtapes > 1?
> >> >
> >> >Recently I decreased tapelength and increased runtapes from 1 to
> >> > 2. On most days 1 vtape is sufficient. But every time Amanda hits
> >> > (artificial as specified by tapetype) end of tape on a vtape and
> >> > retries on the second tape,
> >> >
> >> >she fails with:
> >> >|*** THE DUMPS DID NOT FINISH PROPERLY!
> >> >|
> >> >|These dumps were to tapes DAILY14, DAILY15.
> >> >|The next 2 tapes Amanda expects to used are: DAILY16, DAILY17.
> >> >|
> >> >|FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:
> >> >|  anakin     /usr/share lev 3 FAILED ["data write: Connection
> >> >| reset by peer"]
> >>
> >> ISTR I had a similar problem Geert, but that was because I'd
> >> somehow disabled my holding disk when I converted to vtapes. 
> >> Fixing the
> >
> >I'm indeed not using a holding disk.
> >
> That begs the question then Geert, are you going to have one tonight?

No ;-)

> You see, the reason it failed after it brought in the next 'tape' is 
> that once it had done that, it then discovered that since there was no 
> holdng disk image to work from, it had no copy of the src tarball to 
> retry a save of.  Since amanda isn't wired to repeat the whole 
> disklist entry in the event of a failure, it has no choice but to send 
> you a fail message.

IC...

> Some may say that this is a shortcoming of amanda, but I'm inclined to 
> agree with the amanda design in this respect, as it can go on and 
> finish the rest of the DLE list on the second (or more) tape its 
> allowed to use by the runtapes setting.  If the DLE was truely too big 
> for the medium, then it would sit there and use new medium each time 
> until it had run out of runtapes, or usable tapes.  So if its a fail, 
> there really isn't any use of a retry if the holding disk image is 
> missing.

Unfortunately she never continued with the remaining DLEs, they are just
marked as `RESULTS MISSING' in the report.

Hence runtapes = 2 behaves exactly the same as runtapes = 1, exact that if it
hits end-of-tape on the first one, it wastes the second tape (by just storing
the end-of-tape marker there).

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds