On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 09:36:36AM -0400, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
> We had an intense line of thunderstorms come through in the night of 
> June 10th. It took out power across campus. In our building, log files 
> indicate the power was out from about 23:00 until 00:50, so nearly 2 
> hours. Too long for the battery backups to carry everything.
> 
> Amanda backups were running when the power dropped. I have no way of 
> knowing if the tape was writing when the power dropped or was just 
> sitting in the drive. Anyway, amcleanup did it's job. The serious 
> problem is with the library. It was improperly powered off, and it now 
> doesn't seem to sense the tape that was in the drive. I have to sort 
> that out. In the meantime, mt and mtx aren't happy. The puzzling thing 
> is that when Amanda ran starting the evening of June 11, it did not fall 
> back to incrementals only. It got an error on the tape check, but 
> proceeded to do a mix of fulls and incrementals. When I did amstatus, it 
> showed current things that were "dump done" and "wait for writing to 
> tape", along with things from the 10th that were "waiting to flush". I 
> happen to have plenty of holding disk space, so it's not a problem. But 
> it's also not what I expected to have happened.

What you expected is what happens when amanda has "no place" to put
the dumps.  Your combination of holding disk total space available
and the percentage reserved for degraded mode (a config option defaulting
to 100% but which must have been set lower in your config) left
enough space available to do the normal dumps.  If things had
continued and you reached the reserved percentage, then incrementals
only would have been done.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 12027 Creekbend Drive          (703) 787-0884
 Reston, VA  20194              (703) 787-0922 (fax)