Dear admins,

I'm facing a schedule problem for which I can't find a good solution
so I decided to use your collective wisdom.

I'm running NBU 3.2 with patch J0820412 on a Solaris 2.6 master server
and I have a Solaris 2.7 as a slave server.  Each server is attached
to two DLT7000 drives inside a STK 9714 library.  I also use the
Informix option to backup an Informix database.

My problem is that during the peak of the scheduled full/cumulative
backups that goes from Friday/21:00:00 until Saturday/12:00:00 more or
less all four drives are busy with tapes from the mensal(monthly) and
semanal(weekly) pools so that the backups initiated by the Informix
database for its logs can't be performed because they want to use
tapes from the diario(daily) pool.

One solution would be to increase the number of Informix log files so
that they couldn't be filled in less than 15 hours but as things are
they can be filled in less than 3 hours depending on the amount of
work it's doing.  I would have to multiply the log space by 10 to be
sure it was safe and I can't do it right now.

To bypass the problem what I did (and still do) was to define two
`Backup Policy' schedules for the Informix-ON-BAR class with
complementary windows like so:

        Schedule        Volume Pool     Window
        Default-Policy  diario          Saturday(12:00) -> Friday(21:00)
        Default-Weekend mensal          Friday(21:00)   -> Saturday(12:00)

The intent is to direct the log backups to the diario pool most of the
time and to direct them to the mensal pool during the peak scheduled
backups when the chance of there being a mensal tape in one of the
drives is very high.

This kludge has worked more or less.  The problem is that when some
drives go down or something else happens that cause a delay or a
change to the peak period I have to foresee it and manually change the
schedules above.  This has been very unreliable.

What I really wanted was a way to tell the Default Policy schedule to
automatically use a tape from another pool if all drives are busy with
tapes not from the diario pool.  Or else, if I could simply tell NBU
that the log backup jobs are so high priority that they should put
them on the top of the working queue.  The Informix-ON-BAR class is
already the most privileged one but this seems to not have the desired
effect on the log backups.

As a related issue, does anyone know how/if I can list the current
working list to see how the queued jobs are sorted and how/if I can
change the order myself?  I think this would be a very useful feature
and would let me solve this particular problem.  What do you think?

I'd appreciate any help you can give to me.

Thanks.

Gustavo.