> Subject: [Veritas-bu] drives being marked down/missing
> 
> 
> I sent this to the sun-managers list before finding this list.
> Sorry if you see this twice.
> 
> (I'm not the backup admin, just attacking this from a solaris/hardware
> perspective, but I am working closely with the backup admin on this.)
> 
> We have a running backup system using Netbackup 3.4.1 on an 
> E450, with a small SStoragetek jukebox.  About a month ago we 
> added a larger jukebox to the system, and it was going so 
> well, our backup admin set all jobs to go to the large device 
> and removed the smaller one from netbackup, though leaving it 
> plugged and powered up.
> 
> That night, all backups failed, as the tape drives failed and 
> were marked "down" in succession.
> 
> The next day, we thought there was a problem with the large 
> device, so we had all jobs go to the smaller unit.  The same 
> thing happened, all drives got marked down.
> 
> We deleted all tape units from netbackup and let it 
> rediscover the drives. It found the 4 in the smaller unit OK, 
> but only 4 of 6 in the larger unit. All those drives again 
> failed during testing, and were marked down.
>

We find that we have this problem when the fibre -> scsi
bridge gets confused.  We reboot the bridge and things
are fine.  This is for DLT7000 and SDLT drives in STK
L180 libraries from a Sun E450's and E4500's.  This
would not apply if you are using direct fibre drives.

Ken 
 
> Over the weekend we went to disk, which worked OK.
> 
> We have:
> - checked syslog files, nothing obvious 
> - 4 distinct HBA cards, so there is no common controller
> - cleaned the heads in all drives.
> - deleted the contents of /dev/rmt and run devfsadm (this is 
> a solaris8 box, by the way)
> 
> Any suggestions or experience with this problem is 
> appreciated. I will of course summarize. 
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