Jim,

The 174 errors are due to your tape drives being set to fixed-length
writes instead of variable-length writes..  

basically, when you fill up a tape and there is only 32k or so of space
left on the tape Netbackup will try to write it's last 1MB buffer to that
space.  With variable-length writing set to on, netbackup will cut that
last write short and only write out a 32k chunk of data.  With
fixed-length writing it always tried to dump the entire 1MB buffer that
you have set which ends up failing with the 174 error.

You can set your drives to variable-length writes on a Sun by modifying 
the /kernel/drv/st.conf file (under solaris 2.6 at least)..  

do a "man st" to figure out which bit to set in that file for
variable-length writes..

hope that helps,

Jon

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On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, Jim VandeVegt wrote:

> Can other readers share what your NUMBER and SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS are in
> /usr/openv/netbackup/db/config?
> 
> My master server is a Sun 450, 1 GB RAM, 2x 400 MHz processing. 
> Shared Memory MAX is set to 1GB in /etc/system. Six tape drives.
> 
> I recently noticed my backups were going pretty slow and I realized I
> didn't have these two files in place, thus I was using the default
> 8x32KB buffers. I remembered from my NetBackup class that almost
> everyone increases the size of the buffers and usually decreases the
> numbers, but maintains a great increase in the total size of the
> buffer (size times number).
> 
> I tried 4 buffers 1048576 bytes (2^20 = 1 MB) big. I noticed a
> speedup in backups, but some NT clients started throwing errors.
> 
> Most of the errors are 174, a media manager error, which doesn't make
> a lot of sense; and a few error 41 (network connection timeout).
> 
> But I haven't fully diagnosed the errors net in the log files. I'm
> more interested in what other installations use for the buffer settings.
> 
> =====
> Jim VandeVegt
> vandevegt AT yahoo DOT com vandevegt AT avaya DOT com
> http://members.xoom.com/vandevegt
> Toilet paper should come off the front!
> 
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