In regard to: Re: [Networker] Can you "scanner" a SDLT tape in a SDLT-600...:

All I wanted was to save a little time. I assumed that NW assigned a
volume type based on .. .wait for it .. the type of volume. :-)

How's it supposed to know?  To figure out the type of tape that's actually
been inserted into a particular drive is going to be different for
different types of drives and is probably going to be different for each
operating system.  It's definitely possible, but it requires a much
deeper access to the tape drive than NetWorker currently has.

Rather than having special support for each type of tape drive out there,
and hence different code paths (with different sets of bugs) for every
different type of drive under the sun, NetWorker abstracts a lot of its
access to tape drives.  It's not a true "black box" by any means, but
it's not all that far from it.

You give NetWorker a device path (e.g. /dev/nst0) and you tell it what
type of drive is associated with that device path.  NetWorker opens that
path (possibly setting a particular block size) and flings data into it
until NetWorker gets a write error, at which point it stops writing and
says "tape full".  Every "tape" device has to support a set of commands
(fsf, rewind, eject, etc.), but they're fairly basic and again abstract.

As long as your tape device supports the few commands that NetWorker sends
its way, and NetWorker can read() and write() the device, NetWorker
doesn't really want to know what's actually behind the curtain.

Regarding the other issue you're having, I have to ask: did support
recommend you install a fresh NetWorker server on different hardware?

Yes.

If so, did they recommend you preserve the client ids?

No.

If EMC support
steered you in that direction but didn't warn you about the issues you
would have with restoring from old tapes if you didn't preserve client
ids, then you should be yelling at them.

I've got a call in now about this; big surprise, no one is available. Not
the tech who didn't tell me to copy client IDs, nor the tech who told me
that I needed to rename the server and mmrecov so I could read old tapes,
nor the person who told me all I needed to do was "scanner -m" create a
client with the newly re-discovered clientid; "scanner -i" again.

That's really unfortunate.  You've wasted a whole bunch of time because
they left out a fairly crucial bit of information.  If you had been armed
with that info, you wouldn't be having any of these issues.  I would be
ticked.  When you get email from EMC support people, their signatures
generally include information on who their manager is.  I would be talking
with that manager.

Then again, learning via the "crucible" method can be quite effective.
You've learned a lot about NetWorker in the past few days that I bet
you'll never forget.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney AT ndsu DOT 
edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building                             701-231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164

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