Red and green arrow shown on a drive in the topology display

[brent_degennaro]

One of our drives shows a green arrow pointing up and a red arrow pointing down in the topology display/activity monitor. Can someone tell me what this means?

[J_H_Is_gone]

That would mean mixed state.

Most likely you use SSO ( shared storage option) where more than one media server can use the same tape drive (though only one at a time).

That mixed means that for one server the drive is up and for another server the drive is down.

This can happen if serverA was using the drive - had an issue and downed the drive on serverA.

But has serverB which also has access to the drive has not used it yet, so serverB has not downed the drive.

To find out which server go to the devices tab on the activity monitor (jobs/services/processes/drives)

[brent_degennaro]

Thank you very much.

Each of the drives are showing "Needs cleaning". Is there a way I can reset that status? I cleaned each of the drives through the libraries admin interface and the netbackup cleaning job fails with Daemon failed accepting connection.

[J_H_Is_gone]

Seems like you have NB turned on to do the cleaning, but no cleaning tapes configed.

Semms like you have cleaning tapes assigned to the library so that it will do the cleaning.

So ifyou want the lib to do the cleaning you need to turn cleaning off on NB.

For each drive set the cleaning frequency to 0.  and make sure your lib really has cleaning tapes assigend to it so when a drive asks for cleaning it will do it automaticly.

To set cleaning frequency

1. In the NetBackup Administration Console, select Media and Device Management > evice Monitor.

If an Enterprise Disk Option license is installed, the Device Monitor pane includes both a Drives tab and a Disk Pools.

5. Enter a time (hours) or use the arrow controls to select the number of mount hours between each drive cleaning.

Cleaning Frequency is not available for the robots that do not support frequency-based cleaning. This function is not available for shared drives.

[brent_degennaro]

Thanks again for the info. I just inherited this NetBackup environment without ever working with it before so I'm trying to learn on the fly. I checked the drive cleaning frequency and they are already set to 0 but the needs cleaning comment is there there.

[J_H_Is_gone]

You might want to start a new thread with the topic about auto cleaning to catch somebody attention.

I have never used NB to clean tapes so I am not sure how to get rid of that.

I just knew the answer to the mixed symbol.

[thesanman]

I've been down this route before; I have "auto clean" enabled on my library and as such I felt that NetBackup didn't need to care.

After a support call back in 2007 with Symantec these are the steps I followed.  Note your milage may vary; this was under v6.x but every time I implement a new media server now I always put the NO_TAPEALERT file in place.

Follow these steps to ensure that the file NP_TAPEALERT take affect.
1. Stop all Services in the Netbackup environment

2. Create the file NO_TAPEALERT on ALL MEDIA Servers in the SSO configuration.
Windows: /<install_path>/volmgr/database
UNIX: /usr/openv/volmgr/database

3. Stop and restart ALL NetBackup Services to cache the NO_TAPEALERT directive in memory.

4. CD into install_path\veritas\volmgr\bin and execute the command on ALL media servers to reset the Tape Alert Flag in the ltid table.
tpclean -M <drive_name>

5. Verify if the media server has reset the cleaning flag for a drive by viewing the ltid table by running the command:
ltid -tables -f <Output_filename>
In the file, look for "TapeAlert1:" and "TapeAlert2:" for each drive and a value of either 0 (Drive does not require cleaning) or 1 (Drive needs cleaning).
If value = 1, run tpclean until all drives register 0. Once all media servers have been reset, the NO_TAPEALERT directive will be enabled across the SSO environment.