On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 09:56 +0200, Kern Sibbald wrote: > On Tuesday 11 October 2005 09:06, Erik P. Olsen wrote: > > How does Bacula handle "foreign" tapes? I am currently using Amanda for > > back-up but planning to switch to Bacula and sometimes I erroneously > > leave an Amanda labeled tape in the tape drive. I see the error when > > Bacula complains about the tape and pull it out, but later when Amanda > > recycles the tape it cannot read it and reports i/o error. > > dd if=/dev/nst0 cannot read it either and the only way to recover the > > tape is to erase it and relabel. > > > > Shouldn't Bacula leave the tape untouched when it sees that it does not > > carry the correct Bacula label? > > Unless you have setup for Bacula to automatically label tape (or explicitly > do > a label command), Bacula will not write to a non-Bacula tape. No, I don't have automatic labeling specified and haven't issued any label command. > > However, depending on what version of Bacula you are running, it will > automatically modify your tape drive parameters (variable blocksize, ...) to > be compatible with how Bacula uses tapes. If you subsequently try to use the > drive and the program is expecting a different mode (fixed blocksize, ...) it > will fail.
This sounds possible, but a closer investigation proves that it cannot be the case. I have stopped the bacula tests for a couple of days and today a tape showed the same i/o error symptom and only amanda has used the tape drive the last three times it was used, so drive settings should be OK. I get the following using dd on the tape: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ dd if=/dev/nst0 dd: reading `/dev/nst0': Input/output error 0+0 records in 0+0 records out My conclusion is that since I only use bacula and amanda with the tape drive then bacula has indeed caused the failure (it can hardly be dd or mt). My experience with tapes comes from mainframes and there this type of error would occur with a variable blocked tape where the block size or record size was wrongly recorded on the tape. Could that be the case here? -- Regards, Erik P. Olsen ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
