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Re: cleaning tapes and integration into Amanda backup scheme?
2007-11-29 08:39:11
Craig Dewick wrote:
On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Olivier Nicole wrote:
My Sun L9 array has told me it needs a cleaning tape run. I have one so
that's no problem but what I'd like to know is if there is a way that
Amanda can receive info from the tape drive about the requirement for
cleaning and co-ordinate cleaning tape runs as part of the overall
backup
stragegy?
My strategy, all human based, is to have the cleaning tape on the pile
of the next set of 6 tapes to be used.
I have my tapes pool divided into 3 sets of 6, once I have run through
the current set, I move the stack to the back and come up with a new
stack, on top of which is the cleaning tape.
My L9 tape array has DLT-4 tapes in the first 8 slots, and today I've
put a brand new cleaning tape into the 9th slot. There's nothing in my
tape server's amanda.conf file relating to cleaning tapes, so I'm
wondering where in the Amanda config schema the info about location of
cleaning tapes needs to be. Does Amanda itself need to know, or does
mtx need to know directly?
I have a 16 slot library. I configured Amanda daily backups to work with
slots 1-15, so it would never look at slot 16. Originally, I had the
cleaning tape in 16, but I've only had to use it once in a year, and
that was when I had a faulty tape get caught in the drive. So, I've just
removed it, and I use the 16th slot for archive runs and other special
cases.
From just scanning the wiki with google, it appears that the chg
scripts have the capacity to call a cleaning tape, and that can be
defined for the scripts, but it isn't built into Amanda per se. With
modern drives, it shouldn't be needed much and my inclination is that I
would like to be in manual control of it. If the drive is misbehaving
and seems to need cleaning, I don't want an automated process to keep it
out of sight (out of mind) until it fails and needs major work. That's
just my opinion.
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Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>
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Erdös 4
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