Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Tape drive woes

2007-03-13 12:24:09
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Tape drive woes
From: Jason.Ellis at indymacbank.com (Ellis, Jason)
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:24:09 -0700
We have been having some problems with some of our tape drives and
believe to have narrowed it down to a problem with the drives
themselves. Our current environment is a single Master server running
Windows 2003 Enterprise SP1 and four Media servers running Windows 2003
Enterprise SP1. All our servers are running NetBackup 5.1 MP4.

 

About a week ago Sun (STK) was onsite to perform maintenance. As part of
the maintenance they performed testing on our drives and updated the
drive firmware to the latest revision. However, since then a number of
our drives have not been staying up. After spending several days
troubleshooting the issue from an OS and NetBackup perspective we seem
to have narrowed the problem down the drives. The behavior is that we
can UP the drives in NetBackup and they will stay up until NetBackup
attempts to mount a tape and run a backup job to the drive. These drives
are shared among two Media servers, and it seems that the device host
they go DOWN on is consistent with the Media server that initiates the
backup job to the drive.

 

Looking through the Application Event Log I've noticed the following
errors:

 

1.      TLD(0) drive 18 (device 9) is being DOWNED, status: Unable to
open drive
2.      TLD(0) drive 15 (device 7) is being DOWNED, status: Unable to
SCSI unload drive
3.      TLD(0) drive 19 (device 10) is being DOWNED, status: Drive does
not exist in robot

 

Number two looks like a problem with the drive itself, however numbers
one and three almost looking more like a device path problem within
Netbackup or Windows.

 

In Device Manager we can see the proper number of drives and all the
drives have the proper VERITAS drivers installed. Additionally running a
'tpautoconf -t' and a 'scan' will show the proper number of drives. We
also double-checked the SSO configuration and corrected a few errors,
but this did not seem to have an effect on the problem.

 

Has anybody else seen anything like this before? If you need more
information on our environment let me know. Thank you in advanced for
any help you can provide.

 

Jason Ellis
Technical Consultant, Data Protection Team
IndyMac Bank, La Mirada Datacenter
Phone: (714) 520-3414
Mobile: (714) 889-8734

 

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