Ok, a backup just ran fine and ejected the tape, exactly as it should have.

On Friday, since I had replaced the hardware a few times and done a boot 
-r during the past 2 weeks, I decided that it might be worth it to try 
deleting and recreating the drives and storage unit within NBU. 
Afterwards, I started getting status 96 errors.  It turned out that when 
I recreated the stu, I created it with media type 8mm2 while the media 
was type 8mm.  Once I changed the stu and the drives to 8mm, the test 
backup ran fine.  So I'm going to let backups run tonight and see what 
happens.

According to the Veritas support person I was working with this morning 
(the person from last week is out until Wed), the storage unit should 
not have to be modified or recreated when the hardware changes, at 
least, when the hw specs are the same as before.  So neither of us are 
sure why it seems that recreating the stu fixed the problem.

I'll send another update to the list tomorrow or wednesday once I'm sure 
the issue has been resolved.  In the meantime, if anyone has any insight 
as to why that change may have been the fix, please let me (and the 
list) know.  Thanks!

Justin


Justin C. Lloyd wrote:

> I have a case open with Veritas (and Spectra Logic) on this, but so far 
> we haven't come up with anything and I'm getting desperate.
> 
> I have a Spectra Logic 2K with 15 slots and 2 AIT-3 drives, and I'm 
> using NetBackup Datacenter 4.5 on Solaris 9 (64-bit).  Things have been 
> running relatively fine, but about a week ago I would come in to find 
> that the catalog backups had not started because the two drives were 
> still occupied with tapes from backups.  The backups had completed but 
> the tapes fail to eject.  It looks like they're trying to, because they 
> start moving towards the drive doors, but then settle back in.  This 
> repeats for about 30 seconds and then stops.  The ONLY way to get the 
> tapes out is to physically remove the drives from the library and 
> manually extract the tapes.  This happens EVERY time NBU tries a backup.
> 
> Now, if I use robtest, I can move tapes in and out of drives with no 
> problem.  I cannot, however, use robtest to remove tapes inserted by 
> NBU.  According to Veritas, NBU removes the tapes from the drives using 
> tpunmount, which uses /usr/bin/mt, which uses the OS SCSI tape driver, 
> /kernel/drv/st.  On the other hand, robtest uses Veritas' generic SCSI 
> driver, /kernel/drv/sg.
> 
> Now the *really* strange thing is that I can insert a tape with robtest 
> and remove it with mt.
> 
> Note that the tapes are not *physically* stuck/jammed in the drives.  I 
> can manually unload them without difficulty.  So it would seem that 
> something about how NBU is mounting the tapes is causing this. 
> Everything used to work fine, this just started happening one day.  I 
> have replaced hardware a couple of times before this started, but that 
> was generally due to actually hardware failures.  I just installed a new 
> library last Monday, but that had no effect on the problem.
> 
> I've set VERBOSE = 5 in bp.conf and added some touch files under 
> /usr/openv/volmgr for more logging output, but the Veritas engineer has 
> yet to find something.
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts on this?
> 
> Justin
> 

-- 
Justin C. Lloyd
Unix System Administrator
MCI System Technology Solutions
Office 703.886.3219 Vnet 806.3219