write protected tapes even though they are expired 1

[absynther]

I am having some trouble with Legato write protecting tapes. I am using networker 6.0.1 on SunOS 5.7 with a STK L20 jukebox. My browse policy is set to 1 week and my retention policy is 2 weeks. I have two sets of tapes that I rotate out every two weeks.

For some reason some tapes will stay write protected even after they have expired. I will put in the new batch of tapes and roughly half will be write protected even though they all share the same policies and have had their mode changed to recyclable. Eventually, the tapes will "expire" on their own about a week after they should have expired. Aside from causing the backups to abort, on one occasion it caused the data stores on the exchange server to get corrupted when it tried to back them up while a pending back up was waiting due to the tape mount request.

What else will cause tapes to be write protected even though they are no longer browsable and set to be recyclable? Is there a way I can force write protected tapes to become write enabled? I would appreciate a response from anyone with any kind of insight as I am still learning the nuances of Legato and am baffled as to why tapes shown in the index as expired don't really expire until about a week after the date I have specified.

 

[tonyletigre]

JUST LABEL YOUR TAPES B4 MOUNTING AND NO PROBLEM

 

[absynther]

The tapes are labeled and barcoded. From the documentation I have read you only need to label the tapes when they are new, not everytime you mount them. Does anyone have any intelligent suggestions?

 

[rgzimmer]

Labeling the tapes will eliminate the problem, but that doesn't address why they become read-only.

The way Legato works is the tapes won't expire until there is one full cycle completed past the last full backup. For example:

You do a full on Sunday, then an incremental on Wednesday.
The next Sunday, you do another full, then another inc. on Weds.
The following Sunday, you do another full, which you would think makes the original full now past it's retention of 2 weeks, but it does not.
Since the incremental you did on the first Weds. relies on that original Sunday tape, that Sunday tape can not be overwritten until the Wednesday tape expires. A two week retention policy is in reality a three week one.

This may not be the reason for your problem, but check it out. It may be it.

 

[mikeyt1513]

I am having this same problem with similar Software and Hardware. I am running Solaris 2.6, also using a StorageTek Product(Timberwolf 9730). Was this resolved, my problem is identical.

 

[ddfield]

I have an almost identical problem. Volumes in a autochanger have a 1 month retention and browse period with full weekly backups and daily incremental backups inbetween. But volumes never expire even though all savesets on the tapes have passed their retention and browse periods. Even after 6 or 7 weeks they are do not expire. The only way to use the tapes is by manually relabeling them. This means more work for our ops team when rotating tapes back in to the autochanger. Using fully patched Solaris 8 on an E250 with NW 6.1.1 and an L1000 storage array.

 

[TexExpat]

For what it's worth, here's what I was advised.

I called my vendor's tech support after I experienced this problem. According to him, this indicates that there was some problem with one or more of the save sets on this tape. He said that there could have been a hiccup in the flow of data during the backup or that there could be a prysical problem with the tape itself. He suggested that I make a note of which tapes had this problem. If the problem repeats itself on a specific tape, he suggested that I assume that there was a bad spot on the tape itself and discard the tape.

 

[TexExpat]

I forgot to include something in my earlier reply.

As to the issue of relabeling tapes, my vendor told me that that was the only way to make the tape writable. When I have NetWorker relabel a tape like this, I manually enter the identical label as what it was already labeled so NetWorker relabels it with the same name. This keeps me from having to change the physical label on the tape (or worse yet, forgetting to change the physical label on the tape).