On Wed, 25 Feb 2009, Rosenkoetter, Gabriel wrote:
> 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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>
I use it, it cleans the tapes when the drives need it, works well.
Justin.
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