[Bacula-users] Multiple simultaneous jobs serious bug

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

Hello,

In addition to the tape restore problem that Mike Acar found when
testing multiple simultaneous jobs to the same Volume, I have found a
more serious error, which is a race condition between threads during
tape labeling (relabeling during the first use after a label) that cause
the tape label to be lost or more likely not at the beginning of the
tape.  I have only been able to reproduce this on an SMP system during
regression testing of the OnStream drive, and only when multiple
simultaneous jobs are writing to the same Volume. By the way, it has
nothing to do with an OnStream drive. 

I have now corrected the problem (to be 100% confirmed when I can
schedule time on the SMP system).

This is fix is now in the 1.33 CVS on SourceForge.  

In addition, I have been preparing a release 1.32e, which is now ready
except for documentation, which has all previous 1.32d patches, all new
bugs fixed, plus a few low impact features retrofitted from 1.33 (SD
traps term signal and updates catalog with current tape files, Dan's
non-root userid code, ...).

If possible though it is looking unlikely, I will release 1.32e on
Tuesday, but for an official release I have a lot to do (build on Linux,
Win32, Solaris, and FreeBSD, run here in production at least two nights,
document ...). 

In any case, it is in the CVS as a branch tag and at a minimum, I will
upload a patch for 1.32d to 1.32e as well as a tar source and Win32 beta
binaries.

This will provide a nice current, stable Bacula and allow significant
extension of the 1.33 development cycle.

Best regards,  Kern


PS: Bacula version 1.33 (not 1.32x) is now working and ready for testing
with the OnStream osst driver version 0.9.14 or above. Osst is available
from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/osst/

To make Bacula work you must first load the new driver then, as root,
do:

mt -f /dev/nosst0 defblksize 32768

Also you must add the following to your Device resource in your Storage
daemon's conf file:

  Minimum Block Size = 32768                              
  Maximum Block Size = 32768
  Hardware End of Medium = yes
  BSF at EOM = yes
  Fast Forward Space File = yes
  Two EOF = no

Note, only the first two directives (fixed block size) are required, the
others are standard defaults. However they may NOT be changed from the
default values with the exception of "BSF at EOM" which may be either
yes or no, preferably yes.