Bacula-users

[Bacula-users] Identifying volumes: suggestions for improvement

2009-02-27 13:39:21
Subject: [Bacula-users] Identifying volumes: suggestions for improvement
From: SZÉKELYI Szabolcs <cc AT mail.3d DOT hu>
To: bacula-users AT lists.sf DOT net
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:14:17 +0100
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Hi,

when Bacula (console) asks to specify a volume, it does so by requiring
the user to enter the label or the ID of the volume. This causes
problems if your tapes are labeled with numbers only, since from the
user's point of view it's ambiguous if it will interpret the entered
value as an ID or as a label. This actually happened when we wanted to
purge one of our volumes (irrelevant output truncated):

> *purge jobs volume
> Defined Pools:
>      7: bacula-super-full-tape-Pool
> Select the Pool (1-9): 7
> +---------+------------+-----------+
> | MediaId | VolumeName | ...
> +---------+------------+-----------+
> |      48 | 000040     | Full      |
> |      49 | 000041     | Append    |
> +---------+------------+-----------+
> Enter MediaId or Volume name: 000041
> 1 File on Volume "000008" purged from catalog.
> There are no more Jobs associated with Volume "000008". Marking it purged. 

We wanted to purge the volume with label "000041" (MediaId 49), and the
volume with label "000008" (MediaId 41) got purged.

There are two surprising things in this story:

First, looking back, it's unclear if Bacula interprets the input as a
MediaId or a Label. A solution could be not using labels of numbers
only, however, this should be mentioned in the documentation (I couldn't
find it). A cleaner solution would be dropping the ambiguous question
and asking just the Label or just the MediaId, not in an "as it gets"
manner.

Second, in the above example, Bacula purged a tape that was not part of
the selected pool. I understand why this happened (the list of volumes
is just informational), but as a naive user, I found it strange for the
first time. IMHO this should be checked before purging the tape.

- --
cc

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