"Tape Drive Status Change" alerts from 7.0 Insight Agents

[Steve Kadish]

Hi,

We have a HP MSL5026 tape library with two drives which we use with Arcserve. A while back, I was regularly getting the following errors during Arcserve backups:

"Tape Drive Status Change. The Storage Agent has detected a change in the status of a tape drive. The current physical drive status is indicated in the cpqTapePhyDrvStatus variable."

One of the drives would be reported as "offline," and then a few seconds later, as "ok."

When I went to the 6.40 agents, the errors disappeared. On Friday, I upgraded to the 7.0 support pack, and now they are back - I got four sets during the weekend backups.

Note that there are not any actual errors as reported by Arcserve.

Also, I am using the 6.1.540.100 version of the 64-Bit/66-Mhz Dual Channel Wide Ultra3 SCSI Controller Driver rather than the latest because an HP tech advised me that Arcserve users had had success with that driver.

Does anyone have any insight on what might be causing these messages?

Thanks,
- Steve

[James Kennedy_4]

If your MSL5026 is connected to a storage router, Fibre to SCSI (such as the NSR1200), make sure the firmware on the storage router is up to date.

Make sure the firmware on the MSL is up to date, and both tape drives themselves (if yours has 2).

Are you connected to a SAN or anything complex? or just directly to one server. Let me know more about your environment and I might be able to be more informative.

[Rob Buxton]

Steve,
I seem to recall seeing an HP Advisory regarding something like this.
Are you registered for any of the Active Answers stuff? You may want to look at it.

Alas, I'm a tad ruthless once I've read e-mail and I don't have a link for you.

[Steve Kadish]

Thanks, guys. The library is directly connected via SCSI to the server. No SAN switches or fiber involved. And it and the drives have, if not the lattest, extremely recent software.

Rob - I'm not familiar with "Active Answers," can you point me in that direction? I do recieve the weekly driver update / support bulletin email, but I may have missed this bulletin...

Thanks,
- Steve

[James Kennedy_4]

Steve,

It doesn't sound too complex. Here's what you may want to try.

Go to Control Panel -> HP Management Agents

In the services tab, remove SCSI information to the Inactive agents list.

Hopefully you are using ARCServe 9.0 or higher and have the latest patches for that. If you are not, you should really consider upgrading your version of ARCServe.

Check your event logs for any SCSI Timeout errors, or other strange events that occur during the backup process. They can sometimes be more informative than ARCServe's logs.

[Pat Wilson]

What will be missed if the 'SCSI' is moved to the inactive agents list?

[Rob Buxton]

Steve,
Good point, they've changed so much over the years it's hard to remember where I registered for what.

But the item I was thinking about came out as one of the Advisories and the e-mails are headed up:
Your Daily HP Driver and Support Alert/Notification
They contain details of new Drivers and Advisories of known issues.
I'll try and dig around and see if I can find out where and how I registered for it.

[Steve Kadish]

Hi all,

Thanks for the suggestions. Since I haven't been able to find any old bulletins on this issue, and I don't want to deactivate the SCSI agents, I have opened a ticket with HP and we're proceeding to troubleshoot starting with hardware.

If/when there's an eventual solution, I'll post it on this thread!

- Steve

[Pat Wilson]

As we were having the same issue (with the same model tape library), and also having some failed backups using BackupExec, I pushed the downgrade to the version 6.40 Management agent only. All the other versions from the Windows 2000 v7.00 management pack were retained.
I had also noticed some device timeouts in the event logs approximately every 5 minutes (coincidentally my Hardware Status Polling interval). So far the errors have disappeared, and the SCSI bus is still being monitored (but no more device timeouts).
We are doing some more testing/monitoring, and I'll keep you posted...

[Dan Raney]

I'm just wondering if this worked for folks. We're in a similar to situation to Pat Wilson - using BackupExec instead of ArcServe. Does downgrading the management agent work?