I am sorry to say my friend that re-labeling does not suffice.  When you
"re-label" a volume in networker it does not write back over the labeled
block size set for that tape.  OHHH GOD HOW I WISH IT DID!  In fact I am
planning on putting in an RFE for this.  I mean if the Legato is a tape
backup software would it not be nice if you could tell it or check off an
option like "Re-write label."  That would just make to much sense.
Otherwise we have been doing the same thing you have.  Rewind tape tar some
data to it then have NetWorker re-label the volume.

Hope my experience helps


Chad Smykay, RHCE
Systems Storage Administrator
Rackspace Managed Hosting (TM)
210-892-4025 ext 1603
Cell: 210-273-2344

-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU] 
On
Behalf Of Marigomen, Ted {Info~Palo Alto}
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 3:34 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Tape Positioning by Record is Disabled on AIT
Drives??????

I used to get this a lot.  And, it was always on AIT-2 tapes with weird
block sizes, on AIT-3 drives.  The drive would happily read the tape and
then wham, it encounters a part where the block size is different and then
the error comes up.  We used to have AIT-2 drives which labeled and wrote to
these tapes.  We started getting the errors after we changed the drives to
AIT-3.

We're slowly migrating off of AIT-2 tapes.  In case we do run out of tapes
and have to reuse our old AIT-2 tapes, I make sure to erase them (write
something over them using tar or mt erase) and then label them.
I read that relabeling should suffice (without erasing), but I'm paranoid.



-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU]
On Behalf Of Davina Treiber
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 12:22 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Tape Positioning by Record is Disabled on AIT
Drives??????


Dave Martini 1 wrote:
> I have Networker Server 7.1 and a Spectra Logic treefrog with dual
> Sony AIT-3 Drives running on a solaris 9 server.
>
> My st.conf entry looks like this
>
> tape-config-list=
>            "SONY SDX-700C", "SONY 8mm AIT-3 ", "SONY_AIT3";
>             SONY_AIT3=1,0x36,0,0xd679,1,0x00,0;
>
> Legato says that the syntax of my st.conf is correct for the Sony
> AIT-3.
>
> But whenever I try to restore I get this error.
>
> "Cannot decode block. Verify the device configuration. Tape
> positioning by record is disabled."
>
> Sometimes the recover works and sometimes the recover fails.
>
> I called Legato and they said put these two environment variables in
> place so I put them in the .login file on the UNIX solaris 9 legato
> server machine and rebooted
>
> setenv NSR_DEV_BLOCK_SIZE_AIT_3 192
> setenv NSR_DEV_TAPE_FILE_SIZE 10922
>
> The problem is still occuring.

A .login file is not the place, you need to put these commands in the
startup script for NetWorker, and you need to convert them to sh syntax,
i.e. VARIABLE=value; export VARIABLE The FILE_SIZE variable won't make a
scrap of difference to restores, but may affect the seek time when backing
up.

Somehow I don't think this is your problem though. If you always had the
problem then it might be, but if it is intermittent then it means one of two
things:

(1) You have a mixture of block sizes in use
(2) You have some other error which may be media or drive related, or some
other hardware problem.

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