Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] tape eject failing after backups

2004-04-12 11:49:57
Subject: [Veritas-bu] tape eject failing after backups
From: justin.lloyd AT mci DOT com (Justin C. Lloyd)
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 11:49:57 -0400
I have a case open with Veritas (and Spectra Logic) on this, but so far 
we haven't come up with anything and I'm getting desperate.

I have a Spectra Logic 2K with 15 slots and 2 AIT-3 drives, and I'm 
using NetBackup Datacenter 4.5 on Solaris 9 (64-bit).  Things have been 
running relatively fine, but about a week ago I would come in to find 
that the catalog backups had not started because the two drives were 
still occupied with tapes from backups.  The backups had completed but 
the tapes fail to eject.  It looks like they're trying to, because they 
start moving towards the drive doors, but then settle back in.  This 
repeats for about 30 seconds and then stops.  The ONLY way to get the 
tapes out is to physically remove the drives from the library and 
manually extract the tapes.  This happens EVERY time NBU tries a backup.

Now, if I use robtest, I can move tapes in and out of drives with no 
problem.  I cannot, however, use robtest to remove tapes inserted by 
NBU.  According to Veritas, NBU removes the tapes from the drives using 
tpunmount, which uses /usr/bin/mt, which uses the OS SCSI tape driver, 
/kernel/drv/st.  On the other hand, robtest uses Veritas' generic SCSI 
driver, /kernel/drv/sg.

Now the *really* strange thing is that I can insert a tape with robtest 
and remove it with mt.

Note that the tapes are not *physically* stuck/jammed in the drives.  I 
can manually unload them without difficulty.  So it would seem that 
something about how NBU is mounting the tapes is causing this. 
Everything used to work fine, this just started happening one day.  I 
have replaced hardware a couple of times before this started, but that 
was generally due to actually hardware failures.  I just installed a new 
library last Monday, but that had no effect on the problem.

I've set VERBOSE = 5 in bp.conf and added some touch files under 
/usr/openv/volmgr for more logging output, but the Veritas engineer has 
yet to find something.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Justin

-- 
Justin C. Lloyd
Unix System Administrator
MCI System Technology Solutions
Office 703.886.3219 Vnet 806.3219



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