Then take note.  (FYI: This is documented in the 
technote I mention below...however, this email is more 
a request for an enhancement under 3.4.x than it is a 
bug report).

And Veritas Engineering, please do respond either to 
the list or me individually...its okay I used to be 
with OpenVision, you can talk to me.

Here it goes:

I am sitting at my client site as I type this after 
seeing the following.

They have a big STK Powderhorn with 5000 tapes using 
ACS/LS.  They also use DISABLE_COUNTMEDIA (see 
http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/237534.htm 
 for more information) because of the large volume of 
tapes in the library the process (countmedia) took 
forever.

However, when the volume pool runs out of available 
media and none are in the scratch pool, bpsched -
mainempty invokes bptm -countmedia again, overriding 
the DISABLE_COUNTMEDIA that we set up.  Now I know the 
tech note says that this may happen under the 
conditions previously mentioned, but this has been 
known since July of 2001 (maybe earlier) and seems to 
be a pretty big deal, especially at these big sites 
that backup 3 to 4TB of data PER DAY incrementally.  
They go through tapes like water around here.

Anyway, what happens is the bpsched processes that are 
looking for more media through bptm eventually become 
defunct.  During this fiasco,  you can't query anything 
in your Media Manager Database because vmd is so tied 
up with these count media requests that it returns a 39 
or 70 error.  I was able to terminate vmd after several 
attempts and slowly the bptm processes died off.

however, we weren't able to get NetBackup to respond 
beyond that and had to reboot our server (to clear the 
defunct processes and get NBU back on its feet.)  This 
issue leaves tapes stranded in drives as well, which 
NBU knows nothing about after the reboot.

My question is this:

Veritas Engineering is there going to be a fix for this 
under 3.4.1?  Or will they be forced to move to 4.5 
when that comes out?  And if that's the case, will it 
in fact be fixed in 4.5?

One final note:  I'M NOT BASHING VERITAS...AS A MATTER 
OF FACT KUDOS TO VERITAS FOR THE WORK THEY HAVE DONE 
DOCUMENTING THIS AND OTHER ISSUES FOR US IN THEIR 
KNOWLEDGE BASE.

Thanks

David


<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
David A. Chapa
Consulting Manager
DataStaff, Inc.
847 413 1144
http://www.consulting.datastaff.com
---------------------------------------
http://www.xbpadm-commands.com
NBU-LSERV AT datastaff DOT com - Adv. Scripting