[Networker] SUMMARY: Tape Positioning by Record is Disabled on AIT-3

Thanks to David Gold for solving this one.

According to Legato this is a problem with AIT-3 drives running
on Solaris 8 or 9 and on HP as well.

The answer:

Make sure that you have four spaces between SONY and SDX in the
tape-config-list.

"SONY    SDX-700C", "SONY 8mm AIT-3 ", "SONY_AIT3";

If you do a verbose reconfig reboot (boot -rv or reboot -- -rv), you'll be
able to tell if it picked up your st.conf settings.

AIT still uses 64K block size, not 192K, although that
shouldn't matter.


My original question:

I have Networker Server 7.1 and a Spectra Logic treefrog
with dual Sony AIT-3 Drives running on a solaris 9 server.

My st.conf entry looks like this

tape-config-list=
"SONY SDX-700C", "SONY 8mm AIT-3 ", "SONY_AIT3";
SONY_AIT3=1,0x36,0,0xd679,1,0x00,0;

Legato says that the syntax of my st.conf is correct for the Sony AIT-3.

But whenever I try to restore I get this error.

"Cannot decode block. Verify the device configuration. Tape positioning by
record is disabled."

Sometimes the recover works and sometimes the recover fails.

I called Legato and they said put these two environment variables in place
so I put them in the .login file on the UNIX solaris 9 legato server
machine and rebooted

setenv NSR_DEV_BLOCK_SIZE_AIT_3 192
setenv NSR_DEV_TAPE_FILE_SIZE 10922

The problem is still occuring.
Anyone run into this or have similar drives?
The integrity of these backups and the recovery process
is in question.

Dave Martini
LLNL

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