I have recently acquired a 24-tape LTO4 library which has been running fine with amanda 2.6.1p2 as packaged as part of Fedora 13. I've just had to change out the initial load of tapes tapes for fresh ones. I've labeled them all without incident, B00025 through B00048. "amadmin tape" indicates that a new tape is required, and that B00025 is the next one already labeled. So far, so good.
So I use mtx to load B00025 into the drive and run amcheck. Even though that tape is fine and is what amadmin indicates should be used, B00025 is ejected and B00048 is loaded. In fact, no matter what tape I load, it's ejected and B00048 is loaded (unless B00048 is already in the drive, in which case amcheck is happy). Further experimentation shows that amcheck will always load the highest-numbered tape that's in the library, even if I reorder the tapelist or delete that tape from the tapelist and changer-barcodes files entirely. What I'm not really understanding is why this didn't show up at all with the first set of 24 tapes; they were used in order without incident, and I labeled them in the same order using the same method. Is there any way to force amanda to simply use the tapes in order? I suppose I could just let it write to the tapes in the order it desires and then mark them as new in the tapelist when the tapecycle resets, but if the current behavior continues, that would mean basically running these 24 tapes completely backwards, and so on for the rest of the 100 tapes in the cycle. - J<
