On 2007-11-26 15:36, Craig Dewick wrote:

On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Brian Cuttler wrote:

PS. I'm getting a new cleaning tape for my L9 this week and wondered if

anyone has thought more about how to get cleaning tape usage incorporated

into the Amanda schema somehow? I have left a spare slot in the array
cartridge for the cleaning tape to sit in.

The tape config file in the amanda config directory has options
for cleaning slot and tape count between cleanings, is that what
you are thinking of ?

Yes, just wondering if that can be used to automate cleaning tape usage or whether cleaning cycles need to be done manually. I don't know if Amanda has a way to detect when a drive says it needs cleaning.

Even humans have trouble to know when a drive needs cleaning :-)

The cleaning tapes in DDS drives are lightly abrasive to the magnetic
heads, so they should not be used unless you know the drive is dirty
and cleaning is the lesser of the two evils.
You get "hints" about cleaning when you get excessive read or
write errors on the drive.  But besides dirty heads, there are many
other causes for read/write errors, like temperature, humidity, bad
quality of the tapes (only this one, the whole batch you purchased?).

Not all tape drives have cleaning tapes that could damage the head,
but, I would not let a Amanda automatically "clean" the drive whenever
there was some error with some tape.  Or the logic behind the algorithm
should be more clever than me.

Anyway, a good tapedrive should not need cleaning too frequently.
I never had to clean my LTO-tape drives up to now, 3 years age, no
premature write error encountered yet; they "just work", as you would
expect from decent hardware.


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Paul Bijnens, xplanation Technology Services        Tel  +32 16 397.511
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