Forum Discussion

Jacob_Ruben's avatar
12 years ago
Solved

Tape drives getting down frequently

HI ,

we have netbackup 7.1 in our environment, and for the past few days 3 drives gets down frequetly. i have checked in TL drive status, it shows green and healthy.

i use teh command tpconfig -update -drive 8 -drstatus UP to bring the drive up. it works fine for one day and the next day it goes down again.

any suggestion what could have gone wrong, i have tried reconfiguring but still its the same..

 

  • NBU will DOWN a drive for various reasons -

    • hardware (TapeAlert) errors reported by the drive firmware
    • incorrect mapping between robotic drive numbers and OS device names
    • operators opening robot door and manually inserting tapes. When drive needs to unload, the robot finds the slot occupied and drive cannot unload
    • 3 I/O errors in 12 hours
    • etc...

    To know exact reason why drives are going DOWN in your environment, you need to enable logs:

    Add VERBOSE entry to /usr/openv/volmgr/vm.conf on all media servers and restart NBU.
    Create bptm log folder under /usr/openv/netbackup/logs

    NBU will now log Media Manager info/errors to syslog (/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log)
    NBU I/O will be logged in bptm log.

    Next time a tape drive is DOWN'ed, the exact reason will be logged in syslog.
    Search the log for DOWN, then read the couple of lines above to see what happened.

    Some reading matter:

    How Symantec NetBackup determines if a tape should be frozen or the status of a tape drive should be changed to down, and how to change this behaviour
    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH9748

    Troubleshooting Robot or Drive Issues in NetBackup
    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH169477

     

  • NBU will DOWN a drive for various reasons -

    • hardware (TapeAlert) errors reported by the drive firmware
    • incorrect mapping between robotic drive numbers and OS device names
    • operators opening robot door and manually inserting tapes. When drive needs to unload, the robot finds the slot occupied and drive cannot unload
    • 3 I/O errors in 12 hours
    • etc...

    To know exact reason why drives are going DOWN in your environment, you need to enable logs:

    Add VERBOSE entry to /usr/openv/volmgr/vm.conf on all media servers and restart NBU.
    Create bptm log folder under /usr/openv/netbackup/logs

    NBU will now log Media Manager info/errors to syslog (/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log)
    NBU I/O will be logged in bptm log.

    Next time a tape drive is DOWN'ed, the exact reason will be logged in syslog.
    Search the log for DOWN, then read the couple of lines above to see what happened.

    Some reading matter:

    How Symantec NetBackup determines if a tape should be frozen or the status of a tape drive should be changed to down, and how to change this behaviour
    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH9748

    Troubleshooting Robot or Drive Issues in NetBackup
    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH169477

     

  • could be several reasons for the same ..from bad  media ,cleaning  or  bad drive itself..need to look at the bptm logs

    please share the bptm  (/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/bptm) from the media server