StoreEver Tape Storage
1748195 Members
3432 Online
108759 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Tape Drives rewinding in the middle of a backup

 
Ken McCue
Occasional Contributor

Tape Drives rewinding in the middle of a backup

We have an ESL9000 connected to a N-class HP-US 11.i system. for the last couple of months we have been getting errors showing that drives are getting a rewind command. At first we thought that it was a library problem, but we continue to have the error. Any Ideas as what to check. We are running Veritas Data Center 5.0
2 REPLIES 2
krusty
Honored Contributor

Re: Tape Drives rewinding in the middle of a backup

Hi Ken,

The HPUX kernel will protect anyone on the server you are on from rewinding the tape drive. However in a tape SAN, many hosts can have access to the tape drives at the same time without this limitation. Someone on a different host can easily access the tape drive, crashing your backup.

HPUX 11i has a kernel tunable parameter called "st_san_safe" that attempts to workaround this problem by not creating any "no-rewind-on-close" device files. If you enable this parameter on all the hosts that have access to the tape library, it may fix your problem. I attached a small text file explaining the parameter. Set the parameter to 1 to enable it. I'm not sure if if will go in a delete existing devices files, so you may have to delete the existing ones and reboot to get the new ones, less the "no-rewind-on-close" option ones of course.

Hope this helps,

Curt
"In Vino Veritas"
Peter Godron
Honored Contributor

Re: Tape Drives rewinding in the middle of a backup

Ken,
if you used fbackup you could issue a:
mt -t res
which should reserve the stape for exclusive use.
Regards