Hello. Before getting familiar with bacula I first tried to get familiar
with tapes. I never used taps before but since I got involved in a job
related to backup I think I should be familiar with every common
technology about backup, to give me a good overview to start my work.

In the office we have Sun DDS-3 driver, from what I see it looks pretty
new, not heavily used. I bought some new HB DDS-3 tapes (12G) and try
backup a 10GB directory with simple tar, after cleaned the driver first.

# tar cvf /dev/st0 directory

backup was successful. But try to read from tape was difficult.

# pv < /dev/st0 > /dev/null

For 2 times I got "input / output" error in somewhere close to the first
11MB of data. After cleaning the driver again this error is gone. Then I
got the following error at about 4GB:

pv: (stdin): read failed: cannot allocate memory

When this error take place it's no longer possible to "control" the tape
driver: re-run the command gives the same error at about 4MB. "eject
/dev/st0" doesn't work any longer. If I want the tape ejected I have to
reboot the machine and re-issue eject command.

Since this is the first time I touch the tape driver, can someone tell
me if this looks like a hardware problem, or is it in general tapes are
not reliable and tends to have error, or configuration of the device, or
is the kernel not compatible with the device? I think this is a bit OT
because I still couldn't manage to run bacula on it yet, but also I
don't know where to ask such questions, doesn't seems to exist a "linux
tape mailing list".

Best regards

-- 
Real Softservice

Huateng Tower, Unit 1788
Jia 302 3rd area of Jinsong, Chao Yang

Tel: +86 (10) 8773 0650 ext 603
Mobile: 159 1111 7382
http://www.realss.com


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