Hi All,
Recently implemented an Amanda backup solution using Amanda 2.6.1 on
Centos (as this seems to be the latest version yum knows about) and I've been
having a few problems with tape changing.
In an ideal world, I'd like Amanda to perform it's backup at 1am, and
eject the tape when done. I then wanted it to email a group of people at 11am
to remind them that the tape needed changing.
So I configured a cron job to run amdump, and then call amtape eject
consequently.
Obviously, first time I tried playing with amtape it wasn't happy, as I
didn't have a changer configured, so I set it to chg-manual. This then happily
ejected the tape, and then allowed me to pipe the output of amtape show to
mailx to email.
Lovely I thought, and happily went home. However last night, despite
having a tape in the drive, it failed to backup, and annoyingly sent me an
email every 15mins from 1am until I was eventually able to get into the
building at about 3pm this afternoon! Ejecting the tape and inserting it again
seemed to clear the problem (presumably because at this point amdump was
polling the drive?)
It then obviously ejected the tape, and I wanted to ensure the same
thing didn't happen again, so loaded a new tape, and run amflush as there was a
problem on Thursday also which had left some data on disk, so I tried to get
that onto tape. That kept immediately failing with *** A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED:
[No more writable valid tape found].
I tried then to run amtape slot current to load the tape and got back a
non-sensical error, I tried creating a changer.conf file, but that didn't
really help (other than if in future it has a problem, it'll not bug me every
15mins)
Does anyone have an idea on how to overcome this problem? I've reverted
back to using mt -F /dev/st0 eject to eject the tape, but can't send the
status email each day with the next tape Amanda wants without using amtape...
Cheers!
--
Alex Threlfall
Powred Heating Components Ltd.
