I have two FastStor 22 tape changers from ADIC (http://www.adic.com)
with the DLT 8000 tape drive and I love 'em. Each one is hung off of a
dual processor PC running RH Linux 6.2 and they both have Amanda 2.4.1p1
software. However, the tape changer works reliably on one machine but
unreliably on the other machine. The software is bit-for-bit identical
and the machines don't have any problems if I run the mtx command
manually - I was in despair.
So I traced the chg-zd-mtx script and discovered that there was a
variable, cleancount, that was not getting initialized (as opposed to
being initialized to 0). The reason why is because I copied over the
software files but not the state files,
/usr/local/etc/amanda/changer-*. Somehow, an empty changer-clean file
was created with 0 length, which doesn't work at all. So I poked a
value into it, and now it appears to be working. I am still doing some
more testing (the amtape CONFIGURATION show command is a very good test)
but I have every reason for optimism.
Is this a bug? I'm not sure. If there is a primitive in the Bourne
shell to see if an operand is a valid integer, then use, I think it is;l
otherwise I think that the cost of testing outwieghs the cost of
failure. Instead, we should note in the documentation that if the
changer throws syntax errors, then check for bad changer-* files.
Several of you have been most helpful and patient with me - thank you.
Jeff
--
Jeff Silverman, sysadmin for the Research Computing Systems (RCS)
University of Washington, School of Engineering, Electrical Engineering Dept.
Box 352500, Seattle, WA, 98125-2500 FAX: (206) 221-5264 Phone (206) 543-9378
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rcs.ee.washington.edu/~jeffs
