Grrr...

I can't win..

Brian O'Neill wrote:

I am aware of the "persistent binding" issue, but no one (not here, but on the SAN side) has been able to satisfactorily explain what needs to be done on the Linux side. The HBA vendor had a script to set the persistent bindings, but it seems to have only cared about the Vault itself - it doesn't seem to deal with the tape drives (which do not have WWPNs, just WWNNs). If anyone has examples I can follow, I'd appreciate it.

This does not appear to be the case here. /dev/nst0 still works fine, but the drive that was replaced is the one with the issue. I can use "mt" to communicate with the drive, but Networker seems to detect a fault. The only thing I haven't tried to do yet is do some manual operations with the tape drive outside of Networker (I have to have someone do the manual operations as I am remote...)

Riaan Louwrens wrote:

Brian,

What I see on a semi-regular basis is that drives that are attached to the seem to "change" their scsi path & thus drive ordering.

I.e. the SAN doesnt apply "persistant binding" of the addresses. So when the operating system comes up it assigns a "new" device handle to them as they are discovered. (this is specific to Windows - but I am sure Linux / Unix works on a similar principle (i.e. /dev/rmt/ocbn doesnt actually refer to "drive 1" in your library anymore)).

The way I test for it is (unfortunately a cumbersome route - but it works) to delete my libraries, create manual devices and then manually load tapes into each of them (note the tape labels) then to mount the tape in drive1 and see what labels comes up (do this for each of the drives).

Then you can re-create your library accordingly.

If your path to the autochanger is the same you should be able to use JBEDIT (7.x) to modify the paths to the drives.

One needs to ensure that the SAN has "persistant binding" of all the devices and then soemthign I have found to help (from Windows again - sorry) is to make sure that the scsi cards with lower adresses are on lower numbered PCI slots in yoru system (i.e. they get picked up first and get assigned device handles first) ...

Apologies if I have gone on a tangent for something you already know ... But this is where I have seen similar messages before.

Regards,
Riaan

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