On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 07:56:53PM -0700, Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:
> Amanda 2.6.1, RHEL 5.3
> 
> Hi All:
> 
> To start with I am new to Amanda so please be gentle<g>.
> 
> I have been successful at getting Amanda up and running with our HP
> MSL2024 LTO4 tape library. Where I am having problems is determining
> how to define the sequence in which the tapes will be written. I have
> spent the last several hours pouring over the documentation, the wiki,
> the man pages and numerous Goolge searches but the answer seems to be
> eluding me or I am just not seeing it (a very real possibility). Could
> someone give me a push (or maybe a hard shove) in the right direction?
> 
> Here is some background info (if required):
> 
> 1. We are planning on doing a nightly full backup of selected
>    directories. A single tape will be more that sufficient to hold
>    the data for the foreseeable future so spanning will not be required.
>    I am more concerned with the automatic rotation of tapes.
> 
> 2. I created a single backup set (so far) as follows:
> 
>    amserverconfig DailySet1 --template tape-changer \
>    �-tapedev /dev/nst0 --changerdev /dev/sg1 \
>    --mailto pgiadm AT forsoft DOT com \
>    --dumpcycle 0 --runspercycle 1 --tapecycle 2 --runtapes 1
> 
> 3. I changed the labelstr in the amanada.conf to:
> 
>    labelstr "^DS1-[0-9][0-9]*$"
> 
> 4. I labelled 5 tapes as follows:
> 
>    amlabel DailySet1 DS1-01 slot 1
>    amlabel DailySet1 DS1-02 slot 2
>    amlabel DailySet1 DS1-03 slot 3
>    amlabel DailySet1 DS1-04 slot 4
>    amlabel DailySet1 DS1-05 slot 5
> 
> 5. I set the disklist to (to start with):
> 
>    pgips2 /home user-tar
> 
> 6. My first amdump started with tape 5 and then the next went to 1
>    and then back to 5 and now just uses 5 (and does not dump anything).
> 
> I suspect that part of my problem (probably a large part) is conceptual.
> We have plenty of tape and processing time and I was looking for a full
> backup on each amdump execution. I am not really interested in doing
> full and incremental backups but I am aware that this contrary to the
> "amanda" way of doing things. That being said, I do not really see the

Not true, doing full backups every run is not uncommon.

> need within our setup for incremental backups. The largest part of our
> backups will be large databases which will be included in each and
> every incremental so why bother with incrementals? I know that is
> sacrilege but, hey, I am an all or nothing sort of guy<g> (and getting
> rather "punchy" at the end of another 12-14 hour day).
> 
> But I see I have digressed. Back to my original question: How do
> define the sequence tapes are to be used?
> 
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Have you determined that your tape changer script is functioning
properly?  Look at amtape command and exercise that changer.
Make sure you can select specific slots/tapes; can advance one
slot; can advance one slot from the last position; can list the
tapes; can load a specific tape; etc.

You got stuck on tape five because your tapecycle is 2.  It must
use another tape before reusing tape five and for some reason
it isn't getting to another tape.  That is why I question the
changer setup.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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