Hi All, Recently implemented an Amanda backup solution using Amanda 2.6.1 on Centos (as this seems to be the latest version yum knows about) and I've been having a few problems with tape changing.
In an ideal world, I'd like Amanda to perform it's backup at 1am, and eject the tape when done. I then wanted it to email a group of people at 11am to remind them that the tape needed changing. So I configured a cron job to run amdump, and then call amtape eject consequently. Obviously, first time I tried playing with amtape it wasn't happy, as I didn't have a changer configured, so I set it to chg-manual. This then happily ejected the tape, and then allowed me to pipe the output of amtape show to mailx to email. Lovely I thought, and happily went home. However last night, despite having a tape in the drive, it failed to backup, and annoyingly sent me an email every 15mins from 1am until I was eventually able to get into the building at about 3pm this afternoon! Ejecting the tape and inserting it again seemed to clear the problem (presumably because at this point amdump was polling the drive?) It then obviously ejected the tape, and I wanted to ensure the same thing didn't happen again, so loaded a new tape, and run amflush as there was a problem on Thursday also which had left some data on disk, so I tried to get that onto tape. That kept immediately failing with *** A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED: [No more writable valid tape found]. I tried then to run amtape slot current to load the tape and got back a non-sensical error, I tried creating a changer.conf file, but that didn't really help (other than if in future it has a problem, it'll not bug me every 15mins) Does anyone have an idea on how to overcome this problem? I've reverted back to using mt -F /dev/st0 eject to eject the tape, but can't send the status email each day with the next tape Amanda wants without using amtape... Cheers! -- Alex Threlfall Powred Heating Components Ltd.