No, any version you have has a diagnostic mode in nmc, and also any version
of networker you can change the max error retry from the default of 20 to
some other number.

But I'd question the wisdom of changing it to a higher number - usually if
you get 20 failures in a row there is something wrong - trying more times
isn't going to fix it, just make it take longer to do nothing..

The first things to establish is; are the drives working at all?  Try
manually mounting an existing tape into each drive using the gui. If that
works, but you still have the problem of drives going into service mode
pretty quickly during a backup session then you have a *bad tape* and
attempts to mount it fail over and over again, putting a drive into service
mode after 20 retries and then operations move on to the next drive, and the
next, until all your drives end up in service mode.

Looking into the daemon.log file can help you figure out which tape it is -
you may have a tape with it's WP tab set, but networker's trying to write to
it, or a cleaning tape with a data barcode on it, or the wrong type of media
(eg a LTO1 or LTO4 cart) or the cart might be upside-down... lots of reasons
actually.

There are some bugs in the handling of this sort of problem in 7.3.3 - one
issue you may see is error messages about a 'duplicate label' when trying to
recycle an expired tape - if you get this you have a media database problem
and you need help from EMC and/or an upgrade.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] 
> On
> Behalf Of psoni
> Sent: Thursday, 18 December 2008 6:28 AM
> To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
> Subject: [Networker] tape drive : service mode
> 
> I am using Networker 7.3.3 and can't parameter (Max consecutive errors)
> under advanced tab.
> 
> How do I enable diagnostic mode ?
> 
> Do i have to contact EMC support tech to use eng. mode ?
> 
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------
> |This was sent by soni.parth AT gmail DOT com via Backup Central.
> |Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
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