barcode labels Surestore 10/170

[Sandro Schaer_1]

Hi everyone
I recently encountered a strange behaviuor of our Surestore 10/170 tape library. We currently have 4 DLT8000 drive and the first 84 slots filled with DLT tapes. Also there are 4 Ultrium drives and slots 85 htru 140 filled with Ultrium tapes. All medias have DLT respectively LTO labels from "Contact Supplychain Solutions" as recommended and approved by HP.

Now what happens ? We had to reboot the library some days ago. Cell audit and all the other checks are done without errors. When using "mc -p -r S" it shows all slots full. Label numbers are shown for some of the medias. Shutting down and repowering the library again shows a similar result except that now the labels for other medias than before are shown. We actually restarted the library a couple of times and never had all the label numbers displayed. Worst of all I cannot access medias for which the labels was not scanned.


Is there anybody out there who can help me ? It's rather urgent since we're unable to do proper backups.


Thanks for your help

Sandro

[Michael Tully]

Have a good look at your firmware levels. I am not familiar with this model, but does it have any type of Fibre channel. If so the FC/SCSI bridge may be causing it.
There has been a lot of firmware problems with tape libraries in the last six months.
Also if you use Omniback, the library and the Omniback database can get out of sync. Re-scan you library from Omniback as well.

-Michael

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Sandro,

Sounds like a firmware issue. I've had some labels slip slightly out of position before but not a large number at once and not different ones each scan.

I presume these labels (the ones actually on the tapes right now) have been used before without problem. If not, they may need to be verified.

Lastly, are your patches up to date for the backup software you're using?

Darrell

[Scot Dowdy]

Hi Sandro,

The latest 10/180 library code is 2.36. If you are currently using 2.36, did the label problems appear when this code was loaded into your library?

Can you post the FSC codes of the library that are generated immediately after the library resets? To pull the complete FSC listing you can use the web interface.

I suspect either a hardware issue with the bar code reader or a bad batch of labels. Are these brand new labels or have they been in use for many months? When was your library installed?

If you continue to have problems I would recommend you contact your local HP Service engineer to assist in the debug. If the labels are still in question the HP sevice engineer can send me sample bar-code labels for both DLT and LTO for analysis.

[Scot Dowdy]

Hi Sandro,

After doing some more research and reading your question more carefully I have found that the 10/180 libraries are having difficulty reading bar-code labels provided by Contact.

These labels have been found to be out of specification for the 10/180. HP currently has a service note regarding this situation.

You may either contact your HP service engineer to get replacement labels or provide your contact information here and the quantity of each type of label (DLT or LTO) and the numbering sequence for each set and I will pass this information on to our support team. New labels will be provided based on this information.

Thanks for your question.