If one has a robot library with multiple drives, it's my understanding
that amanda has to have a separate configuration for each of those
drives. In other words, you can't run a backup and use all drives against
one disklist.

Correct me if I'm wrong there, if I _am_ wrong it'll make my life so much
easier :)

Now, how do people handle contention for use of the robot ?

If I have 6 drives, and therefore 6 configs (call them tape1 thru tape6
for simplicity), and a 238 slot jukebox with a robot changer. I divide up
the slots, 39 per drive (approx), and then have each chunk of 39 slots be
a separate stack as it were.

However, as I've seen, when labelling (and I'm sure less commonly, but the
condition will also exist when taping). Two amanda processes can reach for
the robot at the same time,since in this configuration they have no
knowledge of other processes.

This results in errors like :

amlabel: could not load slot "current": open SCSI device '/dev/changer' -
Device busy
etc...

Is this something that needs to be dealt with by the underlying mtx
changer code, or have I miconfigured amanda and it can be done more
effiiciently ?

So far, I love amanda, it's very promising. But until I solve this changer
problem, I can't really deploy it.

Cheers,

Al


--
                                 Alan C. Horn
                           Inktomi - Unix Architect.
                               +1-650-653-5436
                              [ahorn AT inktomi DOT com]