Cannot read/write tapes from some drives

Appeared to work, or definitely did work, after it was replaced?

NetBackup manages tape drives using "serialization", i.e. NetBackup uses the tape drive physical "serial numbers" to manage the tape drives themselves.

After replacing a tape drive, NetBackup administrators usually have to amend the NetBackup device configuration to kind of re-register the drive with it's new serial number.

Try this for Unix:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/271366.htm

The NDMP drive appeared to work in that it was able to complete a few jobs and then failed after 1 hour (completing a few jobs in the interim).

The tape it was writing to was successfully written to by another drive after the drive started having problems.

I'm not that hot on NDMP direct attached tape drives, or NDMP device control backups - I've only ever done three way remote host backups via the NDMP data mover on a media server (i.e. NDMP backups over the LAN to a media server, and then out via SAN to tape storage).

Can anyone else help?

I agree with sdw303

after you had the drives replaced, did you remove them from netbackup and readd them so they show the correct serial number...

Match the 3 DB's for the drives, tpconfig, tpautoconf and vmglob they need to match Serial Number, Drive Name and Path if they dont match you will need to update them once this is done you'll be fine, if they do match then you have a hardware problem or something with your medias.

regards

The NDMP drive is attached to a filer for 3-way backups (the robot itself is controlled by the master/media server). The other drives use a SCSI cable connected to the master/media server (one attached to the same server s. 

I've made sure that the s/n's, etc match in netbackup and on the actual drive (and the filer for that drive).

Sorry if I wasn't clear (I was on hold with Symantec at the time).

We replaced one of the drives today and recreated it in netbackup (known good drive). It's working fine now.

2 of the drives were created yesterday and aren't working yet.

I think I'll try re-creating the other 2 drives when the test job is done.. 

What's an IPC job? How would I find one (none show up when I run top or ps -A)?

The NDMP attached drive seems to have been fixed by re-creating it. The other one wasn't.

Alexander Harris 

The ipcs command writes to the standard output information about active interprocess communication facilities. If you do not specify any flags, the ipcs command writes information in a short form about currently active message queues, shared memory segments, semaphores, remote queues, and local queue headers.

commands:

netbackup stop

Hello,

It doesn't look like there are any (correct me if i am wrong).

Before stopping netbackup:

------ Shared Memory Segments --------key        shmid      owner      perms      bytes      nattch     status      0x00000000 0          root      644        72         2                       0x00000000 32769      root      644        16384      2                       0x00000000 65538      root      644        280        2                       0x4d4e5251 110526467  root      644        330752     2                       0x55315352 110559236  root      666        4096       2                       0x44525354 110592005  root      644        632832     4                       0x53494152 110624774  root      644        1024       1                       0x00005643 109641735  root      666        1024       1                       0x00005654 109674504  root      666        1024       1                       ------ Semaphore Arrays --------key        semid      owner      perms      nsems     0x000000a7 0          root      600        1         0x00000000 19431425   root      777        250       0xc9e03647 19464194   root      644        3         0x00000000 19529731   root      777        250       0x4453314d 20054020   root      600        1         0x55535253 20086789   root      666        1         0x00005653 19628038   root      666        1         0x00000000 19759111   root      777        250       0x00006312 622600     root      666        1         ------ Message Queues --------key        msqid      owner      perms      used-bytes   messages    0x4c544952 786432     root       666        0            0           0x52455151 589825     root       600        0            0           0x52455051 622594     root       600        0            0           

 After stopping the netbackup services:

------ Shared Memory Segments --------key        shmid      owner      perms      bytes      nattch     status      0x00000000 0          root      644        72         2                       0x00000000 32769      root      644        16384      2                       0x00000000 65538      root      644        280        2                       ------ Semaphore Arrays --------key        semid      owner      perms      nsems     0x000000a7 0          root      600        1         0x00006312 622600     root      666        1         ------ Message Queues --------key        msqid      owner      perms      used-bytes   messages