tapes not reused although status is recycle

Networker won't try to use a tape that is not in the library in answer to your other question.

Another thing to check - have you put any tape drive restriction on the pool and if so do you have one of those tape devices available at the time?

Are the tapes set to manual recycle? If so Networker will not do this for you, you will need to do it yourself, or you will need to change the flag on the volume from manual recycle to auto recycle (you can do this in the volumes tab of the GUI).

Hi,

thanks for the prompt reply.

No, recycle is set to AUTO. I've also tried to manually "re-recycle" the tape but made no difference.

No tape drive restriction on any pool.

Luca

If you manually load the tape will it be relabeled? Also check if the media family on your devices is matching the one in media db for given volumes.

Another thing to check - have you configured the pool "clonepool" as a pool type "clone"?

Physically, the tape is not write protected.

you pointed out an interesting thing.

"A clone tape can only have one copy of a clone on it, another copy will have to go to a different tape..."

So you are basically saying that I need to re-label the media manually if I want to overwrite them. That's a pity.. I don't see why this should happen because at the end of the day there is no much difference between a normal tape and a clone tape, so if Networker overwrites normal tapes when recyclable why should it not do the same for the clone ones? Is this behaviour configurable somehow?

thanks for pointing this out.

Luca

If it was indicated as being write-protected you had not set the physical write-protect tab on the tape?

One more thing; is there an existing clone of that data on the clone tapes? A clone tape can only have one copy of a clone on it, another copy will have to go to a different tape...

Hi,

yes, the "clonepool" is a "clone" type. I've successfully cloned data on it for the last 2 weeks.

I've tried to manually load the tape before starting the cloning script but did not make any difference (it was mounted in write-protected though.., I'm looking the nsrjb command to mount it in "read/write").

Another thing I've noticed is the (R) next to my tapes :

Jukebox MSL5000: (Ready to accept commands)
slot volume pool barcode volume id recyclable
1: CGE525S(R) ACE CLONING POOL CGE525S 2248005565 yes
2: CGE523S ACE CLONING POOL CGE523S 3020438645 yes
3: CGE604S(R) ACE CLONING POOL CGE604S 219680574 yes
4:
5: CGE555S(R) ACE AD HOC CGE555S 3658231213 yes
6: CGE526S ACE AD HOC CGE526S 3088661109 yes
7: CGE524S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE524S 3541691927 no
8: CGE531S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE531S 3961725372 no
9: CGE541S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE541S 4107252535 no
10: CGE532S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE532S 4129411099 no
11: CGE546S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE546S 4124029590 no
12: CGE527S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE527S 3591246546 yes
13: CGE549S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE549S 1310148170 yes
14: CGE547S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE547S 3994675014 no
15: CGE530S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE530S 3575766497 no
16: CGE539S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE539S 1847536918 no
17: CGE543S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE543S 4111597061 yes
18: CGE529S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE529S 2249587915 yes
19: CGE548S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE548S 3507536307 yes
20: CGE540S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE540S 3003665119 yes
21: CGE536S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE536S 771376616 yes
22: CGE533S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE533S 1054837785 yes
23: CGE545S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE545S 1411331853 no
24: CGE553S ACE GENERAL POOL CGE553S 4262374976 yes
25:

The documentation says that when the tape is full (R) is set, but this should be valid until it's recyclable..??

The saveset I need to clone are on CGE530S & CGE531S and I need them cloned on any of the ACE CLONING POOL tapes.


Luca

No, he didn't say that. He said that that only one clone copy will exists on single volume. If you want to have two clones you will need two different tapes. Nevertheless, I can't see the connection with your problem as tapes do not get relabeled. Could be a problem with 7.3 - perhaps it simply doesn't like space in name of your pool (I don't like it either :D).

When you start cloning and you are waiting for tape - do you see pending message that tape is required for that pool which you have and it is eligible for recycling? Do you see anything when you run nsrjb -h which would indicate that mount request has been initiated or something like that. Did you check if the family of the drive and media match?

Hi,

what do you exactly mean for the family of the drive and the media match?


nsrjb -h shows nothing.

Here an extract of my daemon log :

03/24/06 13:06:23 nsrd: media waiting event: Waiting for 1 writable volumes to backup pool 'ACE CLONING POOL' tape(s) on aceback01.ace.arts.org.uk
03/24/06 13:06:33 nsrd: Cannot find a jukebox containing the volume `CGE598S'.
03/24/06 13:06:51 nsrd: Cannot find a jukebox containing the volume `CGE596S'.
03/24/06 13:07:13 nsrd: Cannot find a jukebox containing the volume `CGE591S'.
03/24/06 13:07:38 nsrd: Cannot find a jukebox containing the volume `CGE582S'.

The tapes it complains about (these plus few others ~50) are not in the library, I have not updated their location to "OFFSITE". Could it be connected?

When you take tapes out it should automatically remove the jukebox from the location field... unless of course you are not taking them out through the mailbox/cap but instead opening the door, switching the tapes and not inventorying the jukebox - if you do add or remove tapes in this way you should always inventory afterwards:

nsrjb -HEv
(to reset the element)

nsrjb -Iv
(to inventory the jukebox)

Hi,
I'm in the impression your question regarding the (R) is not fully answered yet.
(R) means the volume is marked as read only. This correctly means no further write operation will be done to this volume.
This does NOT mean the volume not to be recycled when there is a need to do so.
Another thing I see is, your volumes are marked as recyclable, so this should be possible if needed. However there is no need for NetWorker to do this unless there are other volumes available to continue writing to.

First all writable volume will be written to end (state full), then (if auto media management is enabled) all unlabeled volume will be used and only if none of this is available the oldest recyclable volume will be reused.
Probably this helps to understand what's going on here.

Hi

I think I found what was wrong.. the location field of my media. As I said, I've recently labelled 50 tapes but I didn't change the location that remained the tape library. But these tapes are not in the library anymore.

I've just changed the location of these 50 tapes to "OFFSITE" and Networker picked up the tape eligible for reclying and started to write on it!

In the daemon.log it was complaining about "Cannot find a jukebox containing the volume ..." every 30 seconds for a different tape and after a while it started repeating itself.. maybe it got on a loop or something while it was checking for a tape to use for the cloning process.

could this be the explanation?

It has solved my problem and from now on I'll make sure to update the "location" field when I take the tapes offsite.

Thanks both for your prompt help as usual and for the explanation of how the various bits of networker works.. I'm getting there..

Luca

ps: some time ago we had a Legato consultant in and I specifically asked the question "what is the location field used for?" and his reply was "nothing, it is just for your use".... mmmmh, not really!

Just to answer this...


If you check device propetries you will see what is the media type you have. If you do mminfo against your volume you will see for what they have been labeled too. You mentioned to have 7.3 and some people did reconfiguration of the jukebox thus maybe changing the media type (typical example would be having LTO-3 with version which did not recognize it... so you would define it as LTO-2... then after some time with new version you reconfigure jukebox and now you have LTO-3 defined and all new tapes labeled would be that medai type, bu existing would be still LTO-2. This is known to cause problems with automatic loading of the tapes - until they are labeled manually). I thought that could be your issue - now we know it was not.


It is connected and exactly what your problem was. Location says to NW where the tapes are - if they not updated or inventoried after the manual change (wihtout NW knowledge) NW will still think tapes are inside.