On Monday 14 March 2005 10:14, Mark Lidstone wrote: >Ooops. Answering my own question. I had a limit on the amount of > space to use on the holding disk - Just increased it, so that > should sort it. > >Righto, have turned off hardware compression (using "mt -f /dev/nst0 >compression 0"), changed my tapetype (see below) and, as I said, >increased the size of my holding disk. I will keep an eye on this >tonight.
You have one other problem with that. The state of the hardware compression is stored in a hidden header on the tape, and it will be turned on against your will during the tape drives tape recognition phase. To cancel it for real, one must rewind it dd the label block out to a scratch file rewind it set the compression off with mt (do both variations) dd the scratch file back to the tape, but this time use the rewinding device to do it so that the closing of the path at the end of the dd write will force a rewind, and that in turn will force the drive into a buffer flush since its now dirty, thereby resetting that hidden compression flag. rewind it again & check with amcheck, should be ok. Or, you can dd about 10 megs from /dev/zero to the non-rewinding device after writing the label block back, which will eventually force a buffer flush/write, doing the same thing in terms of resetting the compression flag in the tape header. What I'd do I think, is write a script to do this, and run an amcheck to make sure the right tape is loaded before doing this, then have cron run this script about half an hour before the main amanda run. That way, you won't have destroyed any backups doing all that until the same day the tape is to be reused anyway. Once the tapecycle has been used up and all tapes are set to off, then kill the crontab entry as its just one more pass on the tapes leaders, and a DDS tape dies quick enough as it is. I hope this helps. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
