On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 06:55:12AM -0700, Adam Ardis wrote:
> I'm hoping someone can help me with this, i've looked
> around and can't answer the question myself.  I've got
> two DLT7000 drives directly attached to my Solaris
> server for backups, and they will run normally.  On
> occassion, I'll get a report back like:
> 
> *** A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED: [label DS036 or new tape
> not found in rack]. Some dumps may have been left in
> the holding disk. Run amflush again to flush them to
> tape. The next 2 tapes Amanda expects to used are:
> DS036, DS035.
> 
> Now, there are two tapes in the drives:
> 
> twdev001:/home/amanda$ amtape staging show
> amtape: scanning all 2 slots in tape-changer rack:
> slot 2: date 20030722 label DS026
> slot 1: date 20030722 label DS010

Unless your dumpcycle is < 7 days, you do *NOT* want to over-write
these!

> My questions are why does the backup want to use other
> tapes, and why won't it just use what's in the drives?

Because you have set dumpcycle and tapecycle to tell it not to.

>  Can I get Amanda to just use whatever is in teh
> drives and not care about a retention?

Sure, but unless you know what you're doing (and you don't yet), that
is a really bad idea.

> We rotate the
> tapes out daily, since we need to do it by hand
> anyway.  They go offsite for a month and then back
> into rotation, so we don't really follow any rules as
> to which tape to put in when.  The first two tapes in
> tapelist are what's in the drives, DS026 and DS010,

DS026 and DS010 were written 6 days ago (20030722), NOT more than a
month ago.

> but we may not necessarily have the last two, which
> I'm guessing are what Amanda expects, DS035 and DS036.
> 
> twdev001:/home/amanda/staging$ more tapelist
> 20030722 DS010 reuse
> 20030722 DS026 reuse
> 20030721 DS029 reuse
> 20030718 DS025 reuse
> 20030718 DS008 reuse
> ...Continues down 
> 20030616 DS009 reuse
> 20030610 DS027 reuse
> 20030610 DS035 reuse
> 20030526 DS036 reuse

You've not said, but I'm guessing that you're running some sort of
full-only configuration.

And I'm guessing you've set tapecycle to exactly the number of tapes
you've labeled.

Amanda will decline to overwrite a tape newer than tapecycle runs
old.  You can set tapecycle to 0 if you want.

Amanda will in any case also decline to overwrite the newest run,
because if you do, and the current run fails, you've lost not one
run, but two, right?

-- 
Jay Lessert                               jay_lessert AT accelerant DOT net
Accelerant Networks Inc.                       (voice)1.503.439.3461
Beaverton OR, USA                                (fax)1.503.466.9472