Available tapes not being recognized for pool

[koolv]

Good morning. My problem is I have two pools designated to a L20 JB. One of my pools run without problems, the other one does not recognize that there are available tapes to load, so I get the message "waiting for 1 writable tape". If I manually mount the tape the backup will start, but it will not automatically pull a tape for the pool.

I'm running Networker 6.1 on Solaris 7 (sparc)

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[TDun]

Is there anything on your pool regarding being tied to a device? Are you sure it is prompting for a volume for this pool?
What does nsradmin
print type: NSR pool
show for this pool and what are the messages in the daemon.log?

 

[gweimer]

I've run into the same problem. I had a pool that was working fine, but one day quit loading the tape automatically (there was only one tape for the index pool--a very poor backup configuration I was recently given). Legato's suggestion was to remove the tape from the media DB and relabel it. I couldn't afford to loose the data, so I disabled the pool and created a new pool. The new pool worked just fine. Apparently there was some corruption in one of the DBs that prevented it from working correctly.

Gary Weimer

 

[koolv]

I thought of disabling the pool in question, and creating another, but how will that affect data already saved when you need to restore?

 

[TDun]

If you delet teh tape from the volumes tab, then use scanner command to read in the tape and populate both the file and media indexes, it may well fix the problem.

 

[koolv]

Thanks TDun for your response. My question to you is, how will removing a single tape from the media db, and then scanning it back in correct my pool issue?? My problem is that none of the available tapes that are assigned to this pool are being automatically loaded when the scheduled backup begins. Only when I manually mount them will the backup proceed. If I mount a tape before the scheduled time, the backup will proceed. The tapes are recognized if already mounted in a drive.

Thanks.

 

[TDun]

It wouldn't correct the whole problem, but if it is a media index problem, hopefully it would give you one good tape in the media index, keeping your data.
As such, it should prompt for that tape. I would set the other tapes in the pool to read-only or suspect, to ensure this tape is the first selected, in case another would be picked first.

 

[gweimer]

If you just disable the pool, it will not affect existing data (it just will not write new data to tapes in that pool). You will not be able to delete the pool until all the tapes have been removed from the pool (you probably do not want to do this now--but you can after the tapes have expired).

If the problem pool has short retention times, this fix (or even just testing it..) will not be a big deal, but it is a pain that things are now inconsistant. It will be a REAL pain for those of us in large corporations that are suppose to be using a standard naming convention...