Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Does NBU interpretation of TapeAlert do any good for anybody?

2009-02-25 14:20:44
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Does NBU interpretation of TapeAlert do any good for anybody?
From: "Rosenkoetter, Gabriel" <Gabriel.Rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz>
To: "'VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu'" <VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:06:57 -0500
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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