Automate Media Unfreeze

[raj08]

Hi All,

I am thinking of automating Media Unfreeze in our environment. There are couple of questions regarding this.

1. "/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/goodies/available_media | grep -i FROZEN" will give the forzen tapes. But this command is taking long time to complete. In our environment its taking around 20 minutes. Is it normally works this way? If yes, is there any other command which gives me the frozen medias?

2. What is the best way to find the media host of a particular media? "bpmedialist -m <media_id>" is not helping. Because in our environment some media are allocated to Server Group. Hence for some media, instead of "Server Host" output, I get "Server Group" output in bpmedialist command?

Will "bpmedia -unfreeze -m <media_id> -h <Server Group> works? or only "Server Host" will work? If the second is the answer, what is the other command to find the media host?

My Master Server : HP-UX 11.31

Netbackup Version: 7.1

I know instead of these, GUI or from Opscenter, it is easy to unfreeze media. But I would like to know if an automation with out any manual interaction is possible. Thanks in advance for your inputs. :)

..RAJ

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Not a good idea to automate this.

There are many reasons why media gets frozen. 
Rather spend energy finding the reason and eliminate it.

Unfreezing faulty media 'automatically' serves no purpose.

[Andy_Welburn]

Unfreezing faulty media 'automatically' serves no purpose.

... except for making said media available again & subsequently frozen again with the added joy of potentially damaging your drive(s).

spend energy finding the reason and eliminate it

[mph999]

I agree with the above.

Media should NEVER be unfrozen unless you can prove why it was frozen.

Bad tapes can damage drives, yes, this really does happen.  I saw one case where x6 tapes drives were broken because bad media kept being unfrozen and put back into them.  Rare - yes, impossible - no.

Additionally, media should not be manually frozen to save images, the experation time should be increased to do this, of the media hold feature of 7.5 used.

Martin

[revarooo]

Think of frozen media as potentially a damaging tool such as a hammer. Think of the tape drive as a washing machine, put the hammer in the washing machine again is going to ruin the drum.

(Bad tape = ruined tape drive)

Solution, remove the bad frozen media.

Of couse, frozen media may not be defective tapes, there may be another reason why they are frozen.

As the others have already mentioned, automatically unfreezing media is a BAD BAD idea.

[Andy_Welburn]

Altho' you'll potentially have a clean hammer!

[revarooo]

Indeed. clothes = clean tape ; hammer = bad tape

you understand the analogy ;)

[raj08]

Understood & Agreed. Thanks Marianne, Martin, Andy & Reveroo. Washing machine analogy is Interesting. :)

..RAJ

[D_Flood]

Instead of automatically unfreezing, may I suggest that automating (through a DOS or Shell Script) the following command might be more in order?  This way the reason for the freeze might be more obvious.

BPERROR -problems -t MEDIADEV -M %MASTER% -hoursago %HOURS% -L

Since that's a quote from one of my DOS scripts (Windows Masters) it obviously is set up for some variable substitution but you get the idea.