Another "Expired Media" question

[Dave_Moore]

Heya's,

Apologies for the newbie question, but through trial and error we've had this working ok for a while, and its just fallen over again. We're using Veritas Netbackup DataCentre 4.5FP_3GA, and have a master and 4 media servers running to an LTO silo.

We have had the weekly backups all fail with the error "unable to allocate new media for backup, storage unit has none available(96)".

We had approx. 40 tapes sitting in the Scratch pool, of which 0300L1 is one of them.

Running "bpmedialist -m 0300l1" or "bpexpdate -m 0300l1 -d 0 -force", gives "requested media id was not found in NB media database and/or MM volume database" which we'd expect from expired media.

Running "vmquery -m 0300l1" gives the following:

media ID: 0300L1
media type: 1/2" cartridge tape (6)
barcode: PR0300L1
media description: Added by Media Manager
volume pool: Scratch (4)
robot type: TLD - Tape Library DLT (8)
robot number: 0
robot slot: 32
robot control host: bnebck01
volume group: 00_000_TLD
vault name: ---
vault sent date: ---
vault return date: ---
vault slot: ---
vault session id: ---
created: 01/10/2004 04:10:24 PM
assigned: ---
last mounted: 26/03/2005 11:00:32 AM
first mount: 01/10/2004 10:05:57 PM
expiration date: 15/04/2005 01:44:47 PM
number of mounts: 25
max mounts allowed: ---

So volume manager is seeing the tape as unassigned and as having being expired for a while, but Netbackup is still not picking it, or its friends, out of the Scratch pool when they are needed.

When this last happened, we had to "vmdelete" each of the tapes, and run an inventory to have them re-added. These are then able to be picked up by Netbackup from the same Scratch pool and be used.

While we can do this again, we lose the number of mounts etc, and it doesn't fix the underlying issue.

Does anyone have any tips or ideas for me?

Thanks in advance

Dave

[Jeffrey_Redingt]

Do not delete the tape. Someone has set a physical expiration date on the media. Go into the media window and right click on the tape(s) in question and choose change then where it has the mark for expiration date change that from a specific day to never or to another date in the future.

[Dave_Moore]

Hi J,

Thanks for your reply. This has been something we've looked at previously, but we gave it another try.

We set the expiry date via the GUI on all the tapes 1 hour into the future, and waited for them all to expire. We then ran a "bpexpdate -deassignempty" and tried the backups again. Unfortunately we're getting the same error.

The tapes are showing up the same in vmquery, other than expiry date of course.

Thanks

Dave

[Jeffrey_Redingt]

Sorry apparently I didn't explain it very well. The bpexpdate command is only used on images on tape not on tapes themselves. The expiration in the gui is a physical expiration of the tapes themselves. Once this date occurs they cannot be used again by NetBackup unless the date is removed. The only use for expiration in the gui is to make sure a tape is not reused more than a certain number of days before permanently retiring the tape and never using it again. The problem is that they used the same terminology for physical expiration as image expiration. They should have called it media retirement date or something else to define it better. Bpexpdate has no effect on the expiration date set in the gui. Hope that explains it better.

[patrickkuah]

check your vm.conf for this entry cos it will disappear sometimes ;)
SCRATCH_POOL = SCRATCH

just for your info, your barcode id is pr0300l1 and media id is 0300l1.
You should create a barcode rule to read the media id as pr0300 (exclude the L1).

patrick

[Dave_Moore]

Hi J,

Dead on - I was assuming that the expiration date on the tapes was the same as the expiration of the images - i.e. after the expiration date had passed it can be written to again.

Thanks very much for the tip.

Dave