After several days of searching, reading, and cussing, I am posting my woes
in the hopes someone has some insight to using barcodes.
Just for background, I have a Dell Poweredge-2400 with RedHat 6.2, running
amanda-2.4.2p1. My tape library is an ADIC Scalar 100 hanging off a dedicated
Adaptec 2944UW. All my tapes have been labeled using amlabel. I only have
8 tapes (and a cleaning tape resting in the last slot), as you will see in the
attached configs, as it takes way too long to index 30 tapes.
That said, I'm having trouble with several different paths. I have about 60%
sucess with chg-scsi, and 90% success with chg-zd-mtx (using mtx-1.2.10-1).
chg-scsi problems:
Using this glue script, I can do all of the "tape movement only" functions,
such as amtape's eject, reset, and slot <command or #>. Where it fails is
any activity where it has to load tapes and 'quickly' read from them, such as
amtape's update, label, and show commands. The problem is that amtape is not
giving my library enough time to load up the tape, despite whatever the sleep
setting in my chg-scsi.conf file is set to. I've pretty much confirmed this
with the fact that I can run the same command again after the tape is
completely loaded, and the amlabel shows up fine. Here's an example:
### Ran with no tape in the drive
bash-2.03$ /usr/sbin/amtape Reubens current
amtape: scanning current slot in tape-changer rack:
slot 0: rewinding tape: Input/output error
### This loads a tape from slot 0, but doesn't wait for it to finish winding
### Next is the exact same command, after it's done winding
bash-2.03$ /usr/sbin/amtape Reubens current
amtape: scanning current slot in tape-changer rack:
slot 0: date X label Reubens01
###
Because of this, I can't get the bardcodes from the tapes to do much of
anything. Chg-scsi will populate my barcode file with just the tape loaded,
but when I need to index all the tapes with 'amtape Reubens update' it has no
data, since it doesn't sleep until the tape is ready. My sleep statement has
been everything from 120 - 1200 sec. but I don't believe that is what it is
supposed to do, anyways.
chg-zd-mtx problems:
Actually, I have very few problems with this, except that there is no barcode
work done with it. I had to modify it to work with > 9 slots, and can post
that if someone wants. The main problem is no barcode support. The version of
mtx I have reports the barcodes, so modifying this glue script some more to use
them shouldn't be too much trouble.
This is where I finally start getting to my point...
How does Amanda utilize barcodes? Are there any Amanda commands that directly
mess with barcodes, or is the only thing that has anything to do with them the
changer glue script, and it just so happens that only chg-scsi looks at them
right now? If it's the second, I'm about a few days away from writing a
chg-zd-mtx variant with an "internal" barcode matching system.
I'm attaching about everything I've seen on this group as a usable file for
cases like this, and if there is anything I've missed, please tell me. If,
after looking through my stuff, it looks like a simple fix for chg-scsi on my
part for it to work correctly, that's great.
A quick list of attachments:
- amanda.conf
- ADIC.conf (chg-scsi script)
- status-all.txt (running chg-scsi -status all)
# below 3 were done with no tape in the drive, and 8 in the slots
- chg-scsi.debug.update (generated after running 'amtape Reubens update')
- amtape.debug.update (generated after running 'amtape Reubens update')
- update.txt (what 'amtape Reubens update' spat to the screen)
# outputs from 'amtape Reubens slot current' with tape in drive
- chg-scsi.debug.current
- amtape.debug.current
- current.txt (paste from the screen)
--
Jason Hollinden
SMG Systems Admin
amanda-problems.tar.gz
