I've had a NO_TAPEALERT touch file in all environments I've taken care of
through several employers since the 4.5 days. I used to do that because the
only TapeAlert NetBackup paid attention to (minimally, at the time) was drive
cleaning, and I've always used libraries that were configured to take care of
that themselves.
For a while now, in an environment I don't handle day to day for my current
employer, we've had a heap of frozen media turn up on a regular basis. Because
we're also short on media in that environment at the moment, I poked around and
saw many TapeAlert warnings and "critical" messages (from 9940B drives, on an
HP-UX 11.23 master/media server in both cases) related to the frozen media,
none of which could then be correlated back to an I/O failures. In this
environment, there was no NO_TAPEALERT touch file.
To test things out, I removed the NO_TAPEALERT file in another environment,
where frozen tapes are much more rare (and usually because of a flipped r/w
switch or catalog data on an old tape that found its way back to the scratch
pool)... and immediately got about 12 frozen tapes over one night.
What *appears* to be happening is that bptm finishes writing to a tape, ejects
the tape, checks for TapeAlerts on the drive, finds some (often, drives that
want to dump diags, which I believe requires a visit by Sun/STK)... and
responds by freezing the tape, even though nothing's actually *wrong* with the
tape.
Am I doing something wrong with regard to managing my tape drives that all
these TapeAlerts are popping up?
Am I missing some knob or dial somewhere to adjust what NBU/EMM/bptm decides to
do when it receives a TapeAlert of a particular type? (No, I'm not looking for
the MEDIA_ERROR_THRESHOLD of nbemmcmd: these "errors" are clearly not errors,
and they'll keep happening no matter how high I set that threshold. I want them
to just be ignored, while other, real, errors should still freeze media.)
For now, I'm just putting NO_TAPEALERT touchfiles in place in both
environments...
--
gabriel rosenkoetter
Radian Group Inc, Senior Systems Engineer
gabriel.rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz, 215 231 1556
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