service mode

[millerson]

Hi..

For a few days our devices changes their state to "service mode" .. why tis happens .. what this means??

 

[NWNinja]

It means that the devices are having read or write problems. Too many errors will cause them to go into service mode.
You should check the logs and see if there perhaps is a bad tape that is causing this. I would also suggest cleaning the tape drives, as dirty drives may cause read/write errors.
The daemon.log will tell you more about this problem.

Cheers!
Maverick

 

[ljg]

I've also noticed that our new tape library processes "no label found" entries (when labeling new tapes) as errors - and our max error allowance was 20 but there were 24 tapes in the labelling process. You can change the maximum consecutive errors allowed by a device - edit the device (the tape drive, not the library) and you'll see the option on the configuration tab.

 

[605]

@ljg

I would not recommend this in general. Use Auto Media Management instead and leave the job to NetWorker. Because NW will only label media when needed, you most likely will never encounter 20 consecutive errors.

 

[Rexxy]

but also be aware that Auto Media Management means that the networker server will USE/LABEL any media it finds that it doesnt recognise.... i.e. it assumes that these tapes are blank as they havent been used by that nsr server before...

if you have loaded up tapes from a different nsr server etc for restore purposes etc, or whatever reason, and havent write locked them, it can and will overwrite them if your not careful.....

if someone accidently (yes by accident) removes a volume, i.e. nsrmmd -d <volume> or from gui.....and you deposit it in the jukebox to begin a scan or the tape etc, again if it isnt write locked.....it may relabel it....

 

[605]

Well, NW assumes that an administrator is clever enough to only insert the media into a jukebox to be (re-)used by NW.

Tape labels are only there to prevent media from being acctidentally overwritten by the SAME application. NW does not behave different than any other BU software.

BTW, as far as i have seen NetWorker, it will reuse an old (recyclable) media before it will try to label an unkown tape.