Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] A cautionary tale about media vendors.

2008-04-07 13:41:08
Subject: [Veritas-bu] A cautionary tale about media vendors.
From: "Rosenkoetter, Gabriel" <Gabriel.Rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz>
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 13:12:40 -0400
We recently received some "new" 9940 media, and have had an unusually
high number of tapes stuck (and unwilling to manually unload) in drives.
I'd been a bit suspicious of this (especially since the media has
older-style "StorageTek" and "Imation" vendor stickers on the side,
rather than the new Sun emblazoning), but the final two straws fell
today.

First, a tape was stuck in a drive on its first mount. A manual unload
did work, but remounting it manually immediately failed with FSC 5132 on
the drive's LCD panel. Those of you who've managed to weasel an FSC list
out of SunTK at some point probably know what's coming here: the leader
block was completely detached from the tape inside, a clean break at the
edge of the plastic.

On a theoretically brand new tape, which I was mounting for the first
time.

Yeah. Right.

And as if that weren't enough, one tape had been frozen during Friday
evening's backups. Here's the bptm log message:

18:31:42.516 [8568] <16> write_backup: incorrect media found in drive
index 13, expected EP1319, found D01087, FREEZING EP1319

That's... curious.

So I vmdeleted my EP1319 and vmadded a D01087 with barcode EP1319, and
then did a bpimport for D01087.

Here's what I got (bpmedialist output first, followed by full bpimmedia
-U output):

 id     rl  images   allocated        last updated      density  kbytes
restores
           vimages   expiration       last read         <------- STATUS
------->
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
D01087   2      1   07/15/2007 21:58      N/A           hcart2
0     0
              MPX   04/14/2008 12:24        N/A           IMPORTED


Backup-ID            Policy     Type  RL  Files   C  E  T  PC  Expires
Copy Frag    KB Type Density FNum      Off       Host       DWO MPX
Expires          RL MediaID
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------

ag188u_1184551121    Puredisk   FULL  2   0       N  N  P  1   12:25
04/14/2008
 1   2        0 RMed hcart2  1         2         [REDACTED]  0
D01087


I won't name and shame the VAR who sent us these obviously recycled
media (yet), because I don't know their side of the story (yet), but
this is very, very scary. (There may be more of these, we've only just
started to use that shipment of media.)

If you have a host named ag188u, a policy named Puredisk, and you use
the Dxxxxx volser, you need to take a GOOD HARD LOOK at your media
disposal process, because it appears to be broken.

Yet another reason to start taking media encryption seriously, even for
media you don't intend to send off site during its useable lifetime in
your environment...

--
gabriel rosenkoetter
Radian Group Inc, Unix/Linux/VMware Sysadmin / Backup & Recovery
gabriel.rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz, 215 231 1556 



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