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Error 96 when media is available

ziembac
Level 2

Good morning all,

I know this question has been asked a million times in the past but please bear with me, as I have just taken over the NetBackup administration for our two locations. After hours of reading documentation and forum posts yesterday, I think I have enough of an understanding to make a post here asking for help. That's pretty bad!

I have NetBackup 7.5 running on Red Hat in two locations. Both locations are showing the same issue of having media that's showing as availble in the Netbackup pool (I know, we should be running a scratch pool), not frozen or suspended, but not being utilized for backups. All of the policy jobs in one location are now failing with error 96 due to this media problem. The media is showing as having 0kb, 0 images, 0 valid images, etc. Another thing that I've noticed, this media is all lacking a media retention level, whereas the media that's being utilized has a retention level of 2, which is what is specified in the policies.

I hope I'm making sense. Thank you in advance for any help you can provide. I'm in a tough spot!

5 REPLIES 5

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
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Please show us the following for one of the tapes that you feel should be used:

nbemmcmd -listmedia -mediaid <media-id>

ziembac
Level 2

I'm sorry, another administrator took all of the FULL tapes from the robot and replaced them and ran a refresh. I'm still waiting for the robot to complete so I can get an accurate representation of what's left in the library.

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

Check if a scratch pool is configured. If a scratch pool isn't configured Netbackup will only use the tapes that available within in the pool.

So lets say you have pool A and pool B.

Pool A got free tape so backup will run, pool B got no free tapes so a status 96 will be returned.

Now if a scratch pool is in use, all unassigned (unused) tape would be in that pool, and pool a and b will pick tape from there.

watsons
Level 6

1) Are media type of those available media tapes matching with the density of your tape drive? (e.g. LTO4)

2) If available media tapes are not brand new, do they have "media expiration date" set?

3) Your backup policy should be using "Netbackup" volume pool, and if you have more schedules setup, check the schedule you're running is using "Netbackup" volume pool as well. 

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

... media that's showing as availble in the Netbackup pool ....

Unless your backup policies are specifying NetBackup as pool name, those tapes will not be used.

The only tapes that will considered are the ones in the pool specified in the policy or in Scratch.

Best to create a Scratch pool and move all unassigned tapes to Scratch. You will have to do this once for all tapes. After this, NBU will automatically return expired media to Scratch.

Best to have a barcode rule to automatically add new tapes to Scratch:
Label : <DEFAULT>
Density: (choose correct density)
Pool: Scratch

To understand how NBU chooses media in a robot, see: http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO32854

Status 96 wizard: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=answers&type=wizard&wizardid=NBU090&wizardstepid...