I'm glad to read so good news. Thank you Kern.
I have been trying to understand this issue that a Bacula user has been facing. As Kern said, it is really difficult to replicate it. We noticed that his backups worked fine for days and suddenly a "DEVICE is blocked" appeared. Some details about his configuration:
1) 3 pools being used by 20 or more concurrent jobs;
2) an autochanger with 10 drives (to avoid interleaving, each device was configured with maximum concurrent jobs = 1)
3) jobs with different priorities and various scheduled times.
4) groups of jobs using different pools
He noticed that he was having issues with slot mess. That is, before his backups started, he had the output from mtx-changer listall showing the media/slots information as it was in Bacula's Catalog. Then, after a day of backup jobs run he noticed that mtx-changer listall show different information from the Catalog.
The issue here seemed to be the autochanger timeout configuration. He had an autochanger with a 900 seconds timeout. So we configured the maximum changer/rewind/open wait directives configured for 900 seconds and the mtx-changer script. It seems that this solved the problem with the slot mess.
We thought that this was causing the issue with DEVICE is blocked. But we cannot confirme that by now.
Also he did some schedules and pools modifications. Now all the jobs have the same priority, same time schedule and will use just one pool in a specific day.
We are going to monitor this new configuration and maybe we can post here the results.
Best regards,
Ana