Penny, Eric,

   I was worried about this flag too, especially regarding restores.  Hadn't
though yet about the consequences regarding subsequent images.  I did run one
test backup with the flag in place, and it went succesfully.  A restore from a
file within that image though gave an error:
Error 92 media manager detected image that was not in tar format.

The story so far on my situation is that I have backups going to the new silo
after removing the /usr/openv/netbackup/db/config/SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS file.  It
was set to 262144, and a tcopy check (of the one image with
"NO_POSITION_CHECK") showed that the images were being written at 64KB.  We're
still trying to find out why that is the case, but we have made progress.  My
thanks go out to Eric, Karl, Peter, Penny, and Larry (a whole bunch!), who
have helped with this issue so far.

I'll put a summary to the list once once we get to the bottom of it.
Thanks....Gerrit


Penelope Carr wrote:

> You want to be very careful using this parameter, you an lose data with
> this.  It can allow your tapes to be overwitten.  Tape positioning checks
> are supposed to happen.  How do you think NBU knows where to start putting
> the data??
>
> Penny
>
>  [mailto:ewiland AT nte DOT com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 2:49 PM
> To: 'Gerrit Bos'; NetBackup List
> Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Error 84 on HP LTO drives
>
> Gerrit,
>
> I just finished a battle with the 84 media errors.
>
> Our environment:
> - NB 3.4 Jumbo 3
> - Solaris 7
> - Exabyte 430M Mammoth2 library
>
> The final fix, for us, was to touch the
> /usr/openv/netbackup/db/config/NO_POSITION_CHECK file.
> This tipes p was given to me by Veritas Technical Support after he had
> analyzed
> our st.conf file and
> made sure that it was set to variable length.
>
> It may be worth a shot.
>
> Eric Wiland
> Systems Administrator
> NTE, Inc.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gerrit Bos [mailto:gbos AT uoguelph DOT ca]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2002 12:32 PM
> To: NetBackup List
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Error 84 on HP LTO drives
>
> I am getting error 84's on HP LTO drives in an HP L700 library.  The
> tapes succesfully mount, and start writing a backup image, but after
> about 1.8 GB stops with an error 84:
>
> 09/18/2002 11:04:23 wayback chico.cs  FREEZING media id 700002, too many
> data
>                     blocks written, check tape/driver block size
> configuration
>
> We are using Netbackup 3.4 patched to NB_34_3 on Solaris 8.
>
> The Veritas knowledge base references this exact error, with the advice
> to:
> Configure the /kernel/drv/st.conf file so that drives are being written
> in variable length mode.
> See: http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/248548.htm
>
> Based on Solaris documentation, our entry in st.conf reads:
>
> "HP      Ultrium", "HP Ultrium", "ULTRIUM",
> ULTRIUM = 1,0x36,0,0xd639,4,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x40,3;
>
> The drives in question are HP LTO/Utrium 1 SCSI Model A6323A HVDS
>
> Where the 3 field as '0' is supposed to be variable length.  Doesn any
> one either know what the problem is, or have a working st.conf entry for
> HP Ultrium drives?
>
> Thanks very much in advance....Gerrit
>
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