One drive may easily have needed cleaning for longer... or are you saying the 
two that advertise that are a disjoint set from the one that's down?

What do you see in /var/log/messages when you try to up the drives?

What do you see in /usr/openv/netbackup/logs/bptm/log.MMDDYY and in 
/var/log/messages when the drives are downed of their own accord? (Turn 
VERBOSE=5 on in bp.conf if you haven't already.)

Also, please describe your environment in more detail:

Are these drives in a tape library? If so, does that tape library perform 
automatic cleaning of the drives?

Do you have the /usr/openv/volmgr/database/NO_TAPEALERT touch file in place? 
(Does that file even still get used under 6.5? I don't see a parallel setting 
in nbemmcmd yet...)

(I have something of a vested interest here... I'm about to migrate from HP-UX 
11iv2 to RHEL 5 for our NetBackup servers, so if there's a fundamental flaw in 
the Linux ST driver or NetBackup's use of it, I'd like to know sooner...)

--
gabriel rosenkoetter
Radian Group Inc, Senior Systems Engineer
gabriel.rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz, 215 231 1556


-----Original Message-----
From: Donaldson, Mark [mailto:Mark.Donaldson AT Staples DOT com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 2:34 PM
To: Justin Piszcz
Cc: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Linux slowly dropping drives.

Interesting - I never thought of tpclean.

tpclean shows two in "need cleaning" status but, as I have one drive
down now, there's no correlation with the down drive.

lto2 are scsi drives connected via fc through fiber bridges.

I've had this problem through multiple version of this OS but it's the
only Linux media server in my environment.  (We're using the native lto2
drive, too - supposed to be part of this OS).

-M

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Piszcz [mailto:jpiszcz AT lucidpixels DOT com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:33 AM
To: Donaldson, Mark
Cc: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Linux slowly dropping drives.



On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Donaldson, Mark wrote:

> We have a dedicated media server built on an AMD box running RHEL 5.2
> (2.6.18-92.1.13.el5 #1 SMP Thu Sep 4 03:51:21 EDT 2008 x86_64).
>
> Over time, our LTO2 drives will go down one by one.  A "scan" doesn't
> seem to show any issues but if I "vmoprcmd -up" them, they'll just go
> down again.  After I collect a half-dozen down drives, I reboot the
> server and they'll be fine again for while.
>
> Anybody else having this trouble? Have you solved it?
>
> -M
>
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
>

What does tpclean -L say?

Have they ever stayed up in the past?

Do you have a fiber switched environment?

Justin.





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