On 11/5/07, Chris Hoogendyk <hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu> wrote:
> The question is, "why does the planner go on about promoting full dumps,
> when taper already knows there is no tape?"

Keep in mind that the planner/driver separation is the highest-level
separation in the Amanda core.  'amdump', the shell script,
essentially runs

  planner | driver

The idea is that the planner can do its estimates while the driver is
warming up the tape drive and dumping anything in the holding disk.
the upshot is that planner never finds out that the taper isn't
working -- it just creates a schedule with "normal" and "degraded"
settings for each DLE, and leaves it to the driver to decide which to
use.

Hope that helps!

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com