On Fri, 21 Feb 2003 12:20:18 -0500, Jon Hickmott <jonny AT UWO DOT CA> wrote:

>Our Environment
>
>   * Sun E450 running solaris 8 and legato 6.1.1
>   * Fiber attached StorageTek L700 with 4 IBM LTO tape drives
>
>Problem situation
>
>   * running a saveset clone
>   * clone pool has close to full tapes marked as '100%' but not 'Full'
>     (>100GB on then already (full seems to be ~140GB))
>   * The system mounts one of these close to full clone tapes to append
>     to it
>   * It sits there saying "Moving forward xxx files" for 45 minutes or
>     more
>   * In the mean time (about 30 minutes in) the clone process or mount
>     process times out and restarts
>   * A 2nd tape for the clone pool is mounted (if it is close to full
>     the process begins again)
>   * The clone completes on the 2nd mounted tape (or 3rd sometimes)
>   * The other close to full tapes that were mounted end up in a "ready
>     of writing, idle" state after 45 minutes or so and we can not get
>     them back without restarting networker.
>
>Does anyone know why it is taking so long to reposition a tape? Does it
>have something to do with the 100% full indication or the pool
>type(clone)? I have not seen this problem yet while doing regular
>backups - only the clones. Any tips would be great.
>
>

It's nothing to do with the tape being 100% full, this is just something you
can configure in the device resource (volume default capacity). You may wish
to set this to 140GB.

Also unlikely to be blocksize related, since NetWorker uses 64KB on all
platforms for the Ultrium.

Could be various SAN issues, you haven't given much info about how your L700
and drives are connected to the SAN, and this is the area that is most
likely to give problems in such a configuration. For example you need to
consider persistent binding, zoning, HBA type and config, switch config,
router config, I don't know what you have in there!

Could also be OS patching. Solaris 8 needs the st patch up to date if you
are using st. This is 108725 and needs to be at rev 9. Anything lower and
you will need specific st.conf entries. You could of course be using the
IBMtape drivers, but you haven't said.

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