Persistent Binding on HP-UX 11.11

[David L Brewster]

We are running backup software on our HP-UX v11.11 system. We have 8 tape drives in our library that are used by our backups.
We are seeing an issue where a tape can be in one drive (say Drive 1) and the software believes that the tape is in another drive (say Drive 2). Doesn't happen all of the time, but the annoyance has become something we now need to resolve immediately. Software vendor demands we enable persistent binding. Reading forums I get the impression that there is no such thing on HP-UX.
Has anyone come across this issue and/or now how to resolve?

[Pete Randall]

I believe you'll have to upgrade to 11.31 (version 3) in order to have persistent binding available. I could well be wrong but I don't believe any such thing was available back on 11.11 (version 1). Does your vendor claim that its' software supports version 1?


Pete

[Pete Randall]

Here's some relevant threads:

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1143768
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1213912
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1151261
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1042526


Pete

[David L Brewster]

Yes, vendor claims they support 11.11 v1.
By the way, our interface is HP Tachyon XL2 Fiber. Is there a setting on the card itself for persistent binding?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

If by persistent binding your vendor means tieing tape device files (those things in /dev/rmt ) to the WWN of tape drives on the SAN, then there is NO way to accomplish this with HPUX FC cards on 11iv1 or 11iv2 if your vendor "supports" 11iv1 they should realise this.

I have to say most modern backup software can handle this anyway by storing the serial number of the tape drive and rescanning if something changes (certainly Data Protector and NetBackup can do this)

If your tape drive device files are changing, its cos something in the SAN is changing. It may be possible to stop these things changing but first it would be nice to understand a little more about what you have...

What sort of tape devices/library are we talking about here? What sort of FC switches? Is there some sort of FC/SCSI MUX between the tape drives and the SAN or are they native FC?

What tape device driver are you using - stape or atdd? Do you have an example of an ioscan -fn output before/after the devices appeared to change?

HTH

Duncan

[David L Brewster]

Thanks for your help.
As I suspected, our software was confused after our hardware vendor reset some address to our tape drives in our library (doh!).
There is a utility that I found in our software to re-link the addresses to our application. Once we did this, we had our first clean backup run in 2 weeks.
Thanks again for your time and sharing your knowledge.

Dave