HP DLT/80 tar/dd backup I/O Errors

[Justin Bennett]

Ok I like that that was my beef with BRU. I may just return it. Its a VS80
not a DLT8000, It's slower, uses different tapes. I may just spend the
extra $1500 and get another DLT8000.


Darin Perusich said:
> have you done any searching on HP's site or google for related issues?
> it sounds to me like you might be at that point where you need to call
> HP. the fact that the tapes are not portable would cause me to return
> the drive.
>
> amanda uses the systems native dump and/or tar for backup so there's no
> need to be concerned about propritory data formats. you don't even need
> the amanda binaries to restore files from tape, you can simple use dd
> and dump/tar. i've had instances where i've had to do bad metal restores
>  so i just boot off cd into single use, hookup the tape, and go. try
> doing that will veritas, legato, or bru.
>
> Justin Bennett wrote:
>> Darin Perusich said:
>>
>>>these tapes work for about a week for so in the new drive then they
>>> start to fail. have you tried using these tapes in a different drive?
>>> that could be a double edged sword, if the drive has a problem tapes
>>> used in that drive can pass those problems on to other drives.
>>
>>
>> They are brand new tapes, they won't work in the other dlt drives
>> according to the manual, and in practice.
>>
>>
>>>it could also be the scsi bus it self. is there anything else on the
>>> bus
>>> that is throwing errors? i'm going to guess that you've checked the
>>>scsi  id's and nothing is on id #7.
>>
>>
>> Nope 0,1,2.
>>
>>
>>>i've never heard of having to demagnetize a tape before using it. it's
>>> possible that the dlt is writting something to the first block of the
>>> tape and when you dump to the tape that block is getting written over
>>> and causing the problem. just a thought.
>>
>>
>> I haven't heard either, but according to HP this drive does something
>> to the tape. I can't get it to be consistent, it happens at diffrent
>> times, sometimes it's 7 minutes in others 1 hour 30. It almost seems
>> like it can't keep up for some reason. It's on the same bus as the
>> other drives so their all running at the same speed scsi bus. Maybe
>> the drive is faster than the others? It's an NFS share but the network
>> should keepup with the SCSI tape drive. Can I get tar to dump better
>> errors??
>>
>>
>>
>>>since you have a number of dlt's have you ever looked into using
>>> amanda to dump you systems? you can string all your dlt's together and
>>> make a virtual changer to increase capacity.
>>
>>
>> I've used a number of things BRU for example, was nice for the tape
>> indexing stuff, but I hap problems with the database getting
>> corrupted. I guess I just don't trust these software, like to know
>> that when I do a tar it's gonna work, not relying on some database
>> backen to catalog where my stuff is. I've heard good things about
>> Amanda just haven't played with it yet.
>>
>>
>> This drive is just pissing me off, I should have just bought another
>> one of my surestores. But I was lurred in by the sleek 1U design and 4
>> bay chassis.. :)
>>
>>
>>>Justin Bennett wrote:
>>>
>>>>Ok I just bought another HP DLT 40/80 GB Drive. This one I got a nice
>>>> 4 bay rack mount array for it and everything. I have two existing
>>>> 40/80 DLT drives (diffrent model) that work great. However I just
>>>> learned that any tape that was used in my old drives won't work in
>>>> the new drive, unless I demagnetize them (from the manual of the
>>>> drive) It was kicking my existing tapes out opon insertion. This is
>>>> strange because I didn't think there was any type of formating on
>>>> tapes, but there must be some kind of
>>>>initilization on the tape.
>>>>   Anyways thats not the issue, I bought a new set of tapes for this
>>>>drive
>>>>and everything was working fine for a few days.  Now I get Input
>>>> output errors when writting to the tape. I use tar and dd to set the
>>>> block size.
>>>>
>>>>tar -cf /dev/st0 proj --blocking-factor 128
>>>>
>>>>This is backing the proj directory. I get
>>>>
>>>>Thu Sep 26 00:00:10 EDT 2002
>>>>
>>>>Tape 0 Projects
>>>>tar: /dev/st0: Wrote only 0 of 65536 bytes
>>>>tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>>>>Thu Sep 26 01:23:37 EDT 20021
>>>>
>>>>Sometimes it runs as few as 7 minutes in this case about an
>>>>hour and a half. When I come in The clean/media light is blinking, I
>>>> ran the cleaning cartridge several time, I still get the same thing
>>>> the next night.
>>>>
>>>>Any Ideas? Is an HP vs80 or something while the others are hp
>>>>surestores, the surestores work just fine. They are all on the same
>>>> SCSI bus, but the backups fire in sucsession, when one finishes the
>>>> next goes, so I don't think it's a bandwidth issue on the bus. The
>>>> files are on another server shared by nfs, on 100MBs FD switched
>>>> network.
>>>>
>>>>Justin
>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>Darin Perusich
>>>Unix Systems Administrator
>>>Cognigen Corp.
>>>darinper at cognigencorp.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>This message has been scanned for viruses and
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>>>and is believed to be clean.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Darin Perusich
> Unix Systems Administrator
> Cognigen Corp.
> darinper at cognigencorp.com
>
>
>
> --
> This message has been scanned for viruses and
> dangerous content by Dynabrade using Mailscanner,
> and is believed to be clean.


-- 
-------------------------------------------
Justin Bennett
Red Hat (Linux) Certified Engineer
Network Administrator
Dynabrade Inc.
8989 Sheridan Dr
Clarence, NY 14031
716-631-0100 ext 215