>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf >Of Kern Sibbald >Sent: Saturday, 01 December, 2007 07:38 > >On Thursday 29 November 2007 04:36, John Stoffel wrote: >> Kern, >> >> I'd like to propose a change to how tapes are managed in Bacula with >> the addition of a new column to the Media table of a 'Barcode' column >> with a type of tinyblob. This is what is used for the VolumeName >> column at least, and they are similar. >> >> The idea is that if I do an 'update slots' and Bacula goes >through and >> checks all my volumes in a jukebox and discovers that it doesn't know >> what barcode XYZ123 is, loads the volume, and sees it has a >VolumeName >> of "BackupVol-003", it would then associate that Barcode with the >> proper MediaId and VolumeName. >> >> There would ideally also be an option which says to use the Bacode on >> the physical media as the VolumeName by default. > >Well, the first part of what you are suggesting above is >really a request for >a change (new feature request). As far as I can tell, you are >suggesting to >allow a Volume to be referenced by either its volume name or >by the barcode >value that Bacula finds for that Volume and that the two may >not be the same. >
It seems to me more like John is asking that physical barcode should become a kind of static one-to-one mapping that says "this physical barcode means this bacula volume". If some barcode value is not currently in the Media table then bacula reads the volume to determine its label and adds the barcode to the (proposed) barcode column. If a given volume does not currently have a barcode value in the barcode field and bacula is configured to use barcodes then either the operation which asked for this volume lookup needs operator intervention (preferred) or the sd has to automatically perform an update slots scan (which could produce unpleasant results). This allows for tapes to have arbitrary but unique barcodes which may be more meaningful to library operator(s) while the volumes still maintain labels which are meaningful to the bacula administrator(s) if they are not the same person or group. >I think this request would require a good deal of thought >simply because the >current way that Bacula works is to require the volume name >and the barcode >to be the same. If they are different, and if Bacula attempts >to update it >automatically, I think there could be some serious problems -- >i.e. Bacula >could get mixed up. Perhaps if no Barcode field exists, >Bacula could accept >the first one it found, but thereafter, if the barcode >changed, it would have >to reject the tape. > My first impression is that it should be OK for the barcode and the label to be different but the Media table should be checked to ensure that each barcode is mapped to no more than one volume and vice versa. I think proper error handling (eg. if somebody printed duplicate barcodes) is what would take more thought. >In any case, this is really a feature request that needs to be >handled as such >(see the web page for more ...). I think it could be very >confusing to have >two different volume names so I am not too much in favor of this idea. > That's just my "two cents" but certainly this is a feature request. Thank you, Chris Lee > >Best regards, > >Kern > >> >> Thanks, >> John >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
