All,

       After a frustrating process in which I had a tape drive that would
label tapes that my other drives couldn't read, I chose to force the
blocksize on my AIT-3 tapes to 192K.   (I believed that was the handler
default for AIT-3, is this wrong?)

I tell Networker to use these block sizes in the startup:

NSR_DEV_BLOCK_SIZE_8MM_AIT_3=192
export NSR_DEV_BLOCK_SIZE_8MM_AIT_3
NSR_DEV_BLOCK_SIZE_8MM_AIT_2=64
export NSR_DEV_BLOCK_SIZE_8MM_AIT_2

This result in the following messages:

May 14 15:18:48 tapes logger: NetWorker media: (notice) setting (8mm
AIT-2) block size to (64 KB)
May 14 15:18:49 tapes logger: NetWorker media: (notice) setting (8mm
AIT-3) block size to (192 KB)


I run stinit and get kernel messages similar to:

st2: Block limits 2 - 16777215 bytes.

Since two of my drives will be getting only AIT-3 tapes,
I set their block size to 192K through nwadmin.

Checking with scanner, it looks like the block size is correctly
set on the tapes I've produced.

======================================================
When the tape is full and it's time to verify the media, I get the
following:

media notice: Volume "lnx57.0308" on device "/dev/nst1": Cannot decode
block. Verify the device configuration. Tape positioning by record is
disabled.
Mon 12:08:38 media info: verification of volume "lnx57.0308", volid
162008460 succeeded.

=======================================================

I thought the "cannot decode block" message only came when you didn't
run stinit and the tape simply used default 512-byte blocks.

Can someone tell me if I'm getting a real error?   Should I be labeling
my tapes or defining my drives differently?   What does "handler
default" realy mean -- I think the documentation for it is thin.


                                                       Matt Temple



--
=============================================================
Matthew Temple                Tel:    617/632-2597
Director, Research Computing  Fax:    617/582-7820
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute  mht AT research.dfci.harvard DOT edu
44 Binney Street, LG300/300   http://research.dfci.harvard.edu
Boston, MA 02115              Choice is the Choice!

--
Note: To sign off this list, send a "signoff networker" command via email
to listserv AT listmail.temple DOT edu or visit the list's Web site at
http://listmail.temple.edu/archives/networker.html where you can
also view and post messages to the list.
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=