Apologies for resurrecting a 2.5-week old thread, but I've realised
I ought to wrap up a few things before the [real:-)] millennium...
Chang-Ping Hu <chang-ping.hu(a)netapp.com> wrote:
1>
1> There are a few rationales behind the change.
1>
1> 1. To provide a fix to allow proper handling of a cleaning tape by DLT tape
1> libraries (Burt #29835.)
1>
1> 2. In the case of a stand-alone drive, to provide a consistent drive
1> behavior across various tape drive types. AIT and Exabyte drives will
1> physically eject a tape when an unload command is issued. This change will
1> make the DLT drives respond in a similar way, even though it does not
1> physically eject the tape.
1>
1> 3. The change will require a user to manually reload the tape to enable the
1> DLT drive to read it. This prevents accidentally overwriting a tape user
1> may otherwise think has been unloaded. Again, this is no different from the
1> AIT and Exabyte drives.
I think I'm convinced by the compatibility (2) and safety (3) arguments that
the state before 5.3.7R2 was wrong.
1> In your particular case, to add incremental dumps, an alternative is to use
1> nrst0a instead urst0a. If you don't really care about the previous data
1> on the tape, you can even use rst0a.
and also Amol Chitre <Amol.Chitre(a)netapp.com> wrote
2>
2> In the absence of a stacker, why are you using a urst0a? It seems to me that
2> you are overwriting during the incremental dumps. In that case, you can use
2> a rst0a and the tape will not be unloaded. On the other hand, if you dont
2> want to overwrite, you can use nrst0a. In case you want to continue with
2> urst0a, you might have to do a manual unload and reload everytime.
I ought to have made this clearer. I use nrst0a exclusively for the dumps
themselves, and pack several of them onto a single tape (these are small
incremental dumps). There's an outer-level management script that checks
labels, writes packing lists, and positions the tape, all via the na_rmt(8)
interface [q.v.]. Dumps on successive days do not overwrite each other:
they get added on the end of the tape.
At the moment, the management script ends up unloading the tape ("I6\n1\n"
to na_rmt). Just opening the tape again the next day reloads it if the same
tape is still sitting in the drive. This is convenient at times without
operator cover.
Obviously I can change this to not unload the tape, but that has some
disadvantages, including the greater exposure to loss of the filemark
directory on a power failure that I mentioned before. I can live with
it, though!
Solaris' rmt implementation supports some larger-numbered "I" (ioctl)
operations beyond 6, including 14 (MTLOAD). A nice solution for me
would be to have ONTAP's rmt support this as well: an explicit load
request doesn't fall into the overwrite-the-tape-by-accident scenario.
However, I suppose that these extensions are highly unstandardised,
and it might be asking rather a lot of NetApp to support them.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service,
Email: cet1(a)ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.