Another newbie request for help - Legato Storage Manager messages

[Greg Gibson]

Hi again folks,

After resolving my problem with fbackup processes that were hanging up, and eventually running a shutdown -r to clean up those processes, I am now seeing something new that has never turned up before.

Every 15 minutes or so, the operator console displays a series of syslog messages as follows:

syslog: Legato Storage Manager media: (waiting) backup to pool 'Default' waiting for 1 writable backup tape(s).

Every other message has the word (critical) replacing (waiting) in that text. I end up with a block of 5 messages around the same time, one (waiting), one (critical), then those two again, and an extra (critical). Then about 15 minutes later the cycle repeats itself.

I have good tapes in an external tape unit that we use to run our nightly backups. We also have a tape drive on the main box itself, and I just put a blank writable tape in that drive as well. Having good writable tapes in my available drives (at least I'm fairly sure they're good) has no effect on these messages - they still keep coming.

Does anyone have any idea what I need to do here? The messages are getting troublesome as I don't know what condition they represent, not to mention that loading all my available tape drives apparently has no effect.

Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to offer!

Greg

[melvyn burnard · Accepted solution]

well there are quite a few threads already in the ITRC forums to do with this.
The first question to be asked is are you using LSM?
If no then did you recently install Oracle?
You can turn it off by doing:
/sbin/init.d/networker stop

Just using the following keywords in the ITRC search box, selcting "All words" as the Search Criteria:
syslog Legato Storage Manager media
and this will give you threads to read through

[Greg Gibson]

Thanks for your quick response.

I am not knowingly using LSM - is this an Oracle product? I have no training on that or anything else on this box.

Also, Oracle has been installed on the box from its arrival at our door over 8 years ago, so it is not new on the system.

I'll look through some of the other threads.

Thanks again for your helpful response.

Greg

[Deoncia Grayson_1]

This link might be of interest:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=195995

If you read completely through it will tell how to stop that message from appearing...

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

The pool Default is a tape pool for anything that didn't get assigned a proper pool, so something is not okay there, but it might have been for some time and could at first the considered status quo.

The tapes won't be touched by the application until You used it to 'label' and 'mount' them. On labeling, the tape can be assigned to the 'Default' pool.

unfortunately I only know the regular networker backup tool and never saw the LSM extensions (LSM is hiearchical storage management, so files to be pushed of to tape. I'd hope Legato's implementation is good enough to need delete files until they really reached a tape), so I can't give safe advice on that.

My best guess would be: look at it carefully :)

For that to be You'll need a Xserver running on Your workstation, then use
export :0.0
'whereis nwadmin' should report the location of the administration GUI if it's in the operating systems' PATH variable.
otherwise do a find / -local -name nwadmin

On my box this would be
1. start xserver
2. ssh/telnet server_ip
3. su - root
4. export DISPLAY=pc_ip:0.0
5. /opt/networker/bin/nwadmin &

look at the tape drive listing, are they reported as mounted? physically indentify them

look at the sessions paragraph - here are the outstanding backups

hmmm, ah! all log messages go to /nsr/logs/daemon.log

You might want to consider stopping networker, moving away the logfile and starting it again to come to a reasonable amount of messages to skim through.


hopefully Your company has a support contract for networker - if Yes, let some supporter help You gather the data.

If You think You got some reasonable overview (there is context-sensitive help throughout the program), get a fresh tape, put it into a slot (for safety, eject everything else) and label the tape, assigning it to pool 'default'.
after mounting it, NetWorker will start to backup what it wanted to backup.
If You click 'Volumes' You can see a high-level view of what was backuped to this and prior tapes, this should prove helpful.

Good luck... again :)

[Greg Gibson]

I have run the networker stop command, and all is now apparently well. This should not have any effect on our nightly fbackup scripts scheduled in crontab, as they occur outside of Oracle altogether.

Thanks much to all who responded - it is greatly appreciated!!

Greg