On 4 maj 2008, at 04.40, John Drescher wrote:

> On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Erik Persson <erik AT lysator.liu DOT se>  
> wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> This would be my first post to this list.  We have deployed three
>> bacula installations at the company I work for and it has been  
>> working
>> fairly well except for one thing:
>>
>> Whenever we are running a backup job that causes the tape library to
>> run out of tapes we usually get sd crashes while labelling (or
>> possibly even just inventorying) new tapes.  Sequence as follows:
>>
>> * Bacula wants to mount a tape for pool foo
>> * unmount is performed
>> * Magazine is ejected
>> * New unlabeled tapes are loaded
>> * Labeling is requested
>> * bacula-sd dies
>>
>> This happens pretty much on every attempt.  I am unsure wether it  
>> also
>> happens if just an update slots on appendable/purged media is  
>> performed.
>>
>> We have not seen any crashes while labeling or scanning if bacula is
>> otherwise idle so defining the jobs so that they are guaranteed not  
>> to
>> run out of tapes does kind of take care of the problem.
>>
>> A sysadmin friend who has been dealing with mtx (with bacula and  
>> other
>> backup software) told me that it may be a bit lacking when it comes  
>> to
>> error handling and his theory was that the sd may get confused if mtx
>> returns something bad.
>>
>> One common denominator for these systems is that they are using
>> Overland 20-slot libraries and we have noticed that if an mtx command
>> is issued while a library operation already is in progress we
>> typically get a SCSI error in return.  Could this have something to  
>> do
>> with it?
>>
>> Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>>
> Do you wait 5 minutes after inserting the magazine before trying to
> issue bacula commands to allow the archive inventory to finish? Did
> you do an update slots before you tried to label the tapes?
>
> John

It's a bit of a walk back to the office but I cannot guarantee that  
the library might not have still been inventorying itself.  I'll do an  
mtx status outside of bacula next time to make sure it's ready.

No, I don't usually do an update slots before labeling.  I'll try that  
too and see what happens.

But still:  Is it not a bit odd that the sd just dies if it runs into  
a transient error or inconsistency?

Best regards,

/Erik

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