Please see additional response below   vvvvvvvvvvvvvv


Chad Smykay wrote:

Matt,

We used to use AIT-2 and AIT-3 tapes and tape drives in combination with in
our library and used to have issue.  What we ended up doing was set the
block size in both the ST driver and Networker to the exact same block size
for each type of drives and tapes.  Unless you are trying to use types of
tapes or drives for a specific purpose i.e. faster restores then I would
recommend setting them to both the same size.

On a side note we did find that there was any issue with AIT-3 drive
firmware not able to properly be backwards compatible with AIT-2 tapes.

We are currently running AIT-3 firmware:  0201

This is one of the most recent firmware's for AIT-3 drives.

Regards,




Chad Smykay, RHCE, LCNA
Systems Storage Administrator
Rackspace Managed Hosting (TM)

-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU] 
On
Behalf Of Matt Temple
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 2:14 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Tape positioning by record is disabled.

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



Chad,

       Right now our stinit.def file looks like this:


# SONY AIT-3
manufacturer="SONY" model = "SDX-700C" {
can-bsr scsi2logical drive-buffering
timeout=800
long-timeout=14400
mode1 blocksize=0 density=0x00 }

Are you suggesting I should change it to:

# SONY AIT-3
manufacturer="SONY" model = "SDX-700C" {
can-bsr scsi2logical drive-buffering
timeout=800
long-timeout=14400
mode1 blocksize=196608 density=0x32 }


                                       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!

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