Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
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.
Temporarily change your tapecycle to the total number of tapes you have
(including all the new ones). Then Amanda won't try to re-use an already
used tape, because it isn't eligible. It just happens that the old
algorithms prefer an already used tape if it is eligible, and the scan
forward through the library is Amanda looking through to see if it can
find one. When it gets all the way through and fails, then it will just
go ahead an use the new one that happens to be loaded at that point.
Once you have gone through all the new ones, set your tapecycle back to
what you consider reasonable. Then they are used, so it won't have a
problem using the tapes in the order you have them loaded.
The ancient algorithms will soon get updated with the new api's, and
that kind of nonsense won't happen again.
--
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Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<[email protected]>
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Erdös 4
