Re: [Bacula-devel] Problem mounting a tape

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

Hello Phil,

On my system, I've noticed that if I "force" the tape
drive by mounting/ummounting it immediately after
the Storage daemon has started, I sometimes get into
a race condition that the best I can determine is due
to the SCSI tape hander or the physical tape device
that needs a bit of time to "initialize" with a new
volume. 

Generally if this happens, simply stopping and restarting
the Storage daemon and then waiting a minute before accessing
the tape resolves the problem.  If you are next to the tape
drive it is all rather easy as you can hear the drive
fiddling around with the drive for quite some time before
it settles down.

Another condition that happens very infrequently is that
Bacula thinks it has an old tape in the drive. This generally
occurs when you simply swap the tape without doing an
unmount followed by a mount.  To solve this problem is quite
easy, you can always force Bacula to re-read the tape that
is in the drive by simply doing "unmount" then "mount".

I hope one of the above solves your problems.  If not,
please let me know again.

Best regards,

Kern

On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 06:58, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Kern,
> 
> I've found a minor problem.  I've just updated everything (except the
> Solaris boxes, I'm still working on building a Solaris fd) to v1.29, and
> went and labelled the rest of my tapes.  For some reason, it hung
> mounting the last tape after labelling it, so I quit the console,
> restarted Bacula, and went back into the console.  I then ejected the
> last-labeleld tape, went to remount a previously labelled Bacula tape
> from the console, and got this result:
> 
> *mount
> The defined Storage resources are:
>      1: VXA1
> Item 1 selected automatically.
> 3905 Device /dev/nst0 open but no Bacula volume is mounted.
> *status storage
> Storage resource storage: not found
> The defined Storage resources are:
>      1: VXA1
> Item 1 selected automatically.
> Connecting to Storage daemon VXA1 at babylon5:9103
> 
> babylon5-sd Version: 1.29 (22 January 2003)
> Daemon started 25-Feb-2003 00:34, 0 Jobs run.
> Device /dev/nst0 open but no Bacula volume is mounted.
>     Total Bytes=0 Blocks=0 Bytes/block=0
>     Positioned at File=0 Block=0
> No jobs running.
> ====
> *mount VXA1
> 3905 Device /dev/nst0 open but no Bacula volume is mounted.
> *
> 
> 
> I know the tape is good.  I just restored a file from it yesterday.  I
> eventually figured out that something still thought the tape was
> mounted, so I had to do an unmount before I could mount the tape.  This
> was not at all apparent from the messages, though.  Perhaps some of the
> tape status messages could be made clearer?
>