Cleaning Bar Code (CLNxxx) Not Available, still cleaning media be used ?

[a_la_carte]

Hello Folks,

Environment is as below:-

Master Server: NBU clutsered 7.6.0.1 (Windows 2008 R2 64-bit)

Media Servers (LDOMs) - Solaris 11

Tape Library :- Oracle Storage tek SL150 with 8 LTO-6 tape drives. SSO License.

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We have been using a standard barcode TNMxxxx for all our LTO-6 tapes in our environment. But the problem is that we have a cleaning media but we can't use it as we do not have a cleaning bar code of standard CLNxxx to attach on that cleaning media. 

Is there a way that we can use existing standard TNMxxx barcode and use the cleaning media for cleaning tape drives ?

Or is there a way we can use cleaning media without barcode to clean the tape drives?

Please suggest all possible options.

[RonCaplinger · Accepted solution]

Are you saying you don't have a physical barcode lable for your cleaning tape that starts with the letters "CLN"?  If you are using barcodes, I believe all tapes need a barcode label; that's how the robot identifies the tapes as you put them in the Input/Output door and it reads them. 

If you are sure that it is a cleaning tape, and that it still has available cleans left to be used, you *can* use a TNMxxxxx label, I think.  You will need to set up a new barcode rule that will look at that ONE full barcode and define it as HCLN type.  I think this will work.  Once the tape has been accepted by the robot and you are able to clean the drives, you can delete that barcode rule, as you should never have another tape using that barcode ever again.

[sdo]

Or just manually create a new media ID of TNMxxx and give it a media type of HC_CLN or HC1_CLN etc... and set a cleaning count - and that should be it.  NetBackup will auto-assign the new media to the None pool - and can never be used for backups.

I believe that some libraries cannot perform cleaning unless media have CLNxxx labels - but I don't think NetBackup is that fussy.  After you've created the media ID, then you should be able to load and inventory the library - any barcode rules won't be used for this one media, because the media ID already exists.

And then to clean a drive, I guess you can either hope that NetBackup is able to detect 'clean me' type tape alerts - but if not, you could always:

1) DOWN the tape drive to be cleaned

2) use 'robtest' and do a 's s' to locate the slot with the cleaner media

3) and then do a 'm sN dN' to clean a drive - wait a few mins

4) then move is back 'm dN sN'

5) then UP the drive in NetBackup.

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

It depends on how SL150 treats barcode labels. Some tape library requires tapes to be labeled with sufficient barcode labels. In such case, tape library does not allow mounting insufficient tapes into drives.

Media type field(last 2  of 8 characters) is also matter. It is better to ask Oracle whether SL150 allows cleaning tapes be labeled with your L6 label.

[sdo]

Thinking about this a bit more...

...there should not be a need to do this manually (i.e. DOWN, robtest, move, move, UP), as I suggested above...

...instead, now that NetBackup knows that there is at least one cleaning media available (i.e. at least one tape of type HC*_CLN) then you should just be able to right click a drive and select 'Clean Now' and then NetBackup will search for a HC*_CLN media and mount that, and decrement the cleaning count for you.

HTH.

[Marianne]

Similar recent post:

Cleaning Media

If cleaning is done by NBU (cleaning tape in normal slot for data tapes) you can configure any media id as Cleaning type in None pool.

If cleaning is done by the library (cleaning tapes in special maintenance slot that cannot be seen by backup application) then only labels recognized by the robot can be used.