We had a big legal freeze here with some several thousand media held.
My management tried to save some coin by going with recycled media. We
got *tons* of media with mount errors and freezes all the time. Other
people's data? Oh yeah. Supposedly the media had been "re-certified"
through some process and when we shipped 50 bad media back to them they
thanked us for showing them the problems and they supposedly "fixed"
their media processing "problem." In the end I don't think the savings
on the individual media countered the number that went bad (and were not
replaced.) I did however get a wonderful Christmas package from the
company including a mass produced hat, lunch box and umbrella. They
promptly went into the trash.
Long story short - "pre-owned" "recycled" or otherwise "new to you"
media isn't a deal at all. (Unless you love free crap.)
-Jonathan
-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of
Rosenkoetter, Gabriel
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 1:13 PM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] A cautionary tale about media vendors.
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
_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
|
