Hello Charles,

If you do not know who Alan Brown is, I can say that he is at least 10 
times more knowledgeable about the use of tape drives with Bacula than I 
am, so I defer to his analysis.  The one thing that does not make sense 
to me, however, is your tapeinfo did not show any Tape Alerts, which I 
would have expected.

Best regards,
Kern

On 01/09/2017 06:09 PM, Alan Brown wrote:
> On 09/01/17 14:47, Charles wrote:
>> Hello bacula-users :-)
>>
>> Are any tools available to mend Bacula after almost certainly spurious
>> errors reported by a tape autoloader?
>>
>> Within a few minutes of Bacula starting to use an autoloader which had
>> been subject to an abrupt power outage, the autoloader reported a
>> critical tape alert.  Bacula shows the tape wth status Error (simply
>> reflecting what the autoloader has told it?).
> Are you sure it was the loader which had the critical error?
>
>
> Most "critical errors" of this kind are bacula attempting to unload a
> locked drive
>
> (Lesson: issue explicit unlocking commands in your startup sequence)
>
> Or they're an attempt to unload a tape from a drive where the loader has
> lost track of what slot it came from.
>
> (Lesson: issue explicit drive unload commands in your startup sequence.)
>
>
> Yes, they're errors, but not really critical in the overall scheme of
> things even if the loader thinks they are.
>
>
> If you have multipath fibre/SAS/scsi to the drives, then bear in mind
> that locks are logically ORed together.
>
> ie: If you lock drive Z  from controller N and bacula starts using the
> path from controller P, unlock commands from bacula will come from
> controller X and the drive will remain locked.
>
> This caught us out for a long time. I eventually wrote a small shell
> script which worked out what the paths were to any given drive and
> issued unlock commands for ALL of them. This was grafted into a
> localised MTX-changer script.
>
>
> The overall lesson is simple: "Make sure your drives are empty, BEFORE
> (re)starting bacula-sd"
>
>
> Other than that: update volume={tapelabel} volstatus=append
>
> (Or "used" if you simply want to put the tape in a safe)
>
>
>> We believe the condition is spurious but we do not know how to recover
>> from it apart from re-initialising the tape which holds 97% of our
>> backup volume.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> Charles
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
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