On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Kern Sibbald wrote:
I suspect that this is because the tape is in the drive and the "update slots
scan ..." did not unload it.
I have only ever seen that happen when things are well and truely messed
up on the changer.
If I am not mistaken, this will be corrected by
the new mtx-changer script, which reports back Volumes in the drive as well
as in the magazine.
This brings up another small problem:
We're currently using 'update slots' to park all tapes prior to opening
the changer, in order to avoid people loading tapes into slots used by the
tapes in the drive(s) (I can work out how to avoid the appropriate slots,
but this needs to be foolproof for average users who won't look)
A "park all tapes" command is going to be needed, preferably inside bacula
so the system knows that the tapes are no longer in the drive, or possibly
an "idle autoloader" command to do the same thing. (and an "unidle
autoloader" after the event)
Alternatively (and probably better from a user operations point of view)
Allowing people to load slots randomly is fine from the changer point of
view - almost all changers (and I believe MTX) simply put the unloaded
tape into the next highest available slot (with wraparound) if the slot
the tape was taken from is full, however this will result in Bacula errors
next time the tape is loaded, as it'll be taken from the "old" slot.
Given "update slots" will no longer force unloads, is there any reason why
it can't be run before all loads and after all unloads, in order to
mitigate effects of humans fiddling? (Doing this means that nothing
special has to be done in order to open the changer for tape swaps, AND
that there is no need to wait until all jobs are finished and all drives
are quiet.)
There is one more issue which I've realised today - if the changer is
power cycled, details of what the home slot is for a particular tape in a
drive are lost. At that point, MTX unload will unload to slot 1 unless
explicit arguments are given.
Getting into the realm of extra functionality, if bacula is hanging
waiting for a particular tape or more tapes to be added to a pool, perhaps
update slots can be run each time it retries the job, in order to see if
the tape has been added into the changer?
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