Maybe it's a mistake having put myself on the weekly newbugs mailing list: examining the list always leads to alarm and despondency... :-)
This week it's 29835. That describes a problem with cleaning tapes and issuing the SCSI LOAD command against a DLT7000, and has
| Solution or Fix: | The filer will refrain from issuing the LOAD command to the DLT7000 | at all, since the device autoloads the tape. Available in 5.3.7R2, | 6.0.2 and 6.1.
That sounds as if NetApp is about to remove a feature (accident?) which I think I have been relying on. We have a (Tandberg) DLT7000 drive with no stacker attached to an F740. It certainly "autoloads" when a tape is inserted. However, after an unload, the same tape can be reloaded without manual intervention by accessing it from the F740 - I presume that's the result of the LOAD command at issue. I have used this for adding incremental dumps at times when there's no human available to change tapes (e.g. weekends).
Apart from that, there's a positive advantage in the idle state of the drive being the unloaded one. If the tape is loaded, a power outage will leave the tape directory marked invalid, and the tape controller will need to scan the whole tape for filemarks before it can do anything with it, which can take well over an hour. (Not that this has happened to us on the F740: it's based on experience with DLTs in other contexts.)
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
I have a related question. I am thinking of getting an ADIC Fastore 22 library for a remote F720, which supports "sequential mode" which is some kind of stacker feature. I am a little unclear how I would use this feature to backup the filer with just the built-in dump command, having it change tapes automatically. How would I load the initial tape, and keep track of which tapes were used for the backup? Anyone using a similar setup?
Thanks,
Moshe
Chris Thompson wrote:
Maybe it's a mistake having put myself on the weekly newbugs mailing list: examining the list always leads to alarm and despondency... :-)
This week it's 29835. That describes a problem with cleaning tapes and issuing the SCSI LOAD command against a DLT7000, and has
| Solution or Fix: | The filer will refrain from issuing the LOAD command to the DLT7000 | at all, since the device autoloads the tape. Available in 5.3.7R2, | 6.0.2 and 6.1.
That sounds as if NetApp is about to remove a feature (accident?) which I think I have been relying on. We have a (Tandberg) DLT7000 drive with no stacker attached to an F740. It certainly "autoloads" when a tape is inserted. However, after an unload, the same tape can be reloaded without manual intervention by accessing it from the F740 - I presume that's the result of the LOAD command at issue. I have used this for adding incremental dumps at times when there's no human available to change tapes (e.g. weekends).
Apart from that, there's a positive advantage in the idle state of the drive being the unloaded one. If the tape is loaded, a power outage will leave the tape directory marked invalid, and the tape controller will need to scan the whole tape for filemarks before it can do anything with it, which can take well over an hour. (Not that this has happened to us on the F740: it's based on experience with DLTs in other contexts.)
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
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Chris Thompson -
Moshe Linzer