We've heard tell of some strange behavior on an IBM 3573-TL changer.
Does anyone have one of these, who might be able to verify this?

First, when a tape is moved from a storage element to a data transfer
element (from a storage slot to a drive, for mere mortals), the drive
seems to misidentify the slot from which the volume was taken (in SCSI
terms, the SOURCE STORAGE ELEMENT ADDRESS), and assume that it came
from the lowest-numbered empty slot.  This SCSI field is optional, so
perhaps 'mtx' is making this up?  The end result is that, unless you
have all slots full, Amanda ends up re-ordering your tapes for you,
which is annoying.

Second, and I'm not entirely sure this is the case, the drive seems to
automatically swap in the "next" volume when you unload a tape, which
confuses things with Amanda (since Amanda then skips to the next tape,
so the overall effect is to only scan every other tape).

Has anyone seen this kind of behavior?  I'm planning to build
Amanda::Changer::robot to work with this sort of behavior, but I'd
like to be able to pin it down a bit better first.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com