going from 1 tape to 2
Hi, We've gotten to the point where Amanda now needs multiple tapes. Our other systems crossed that point years ago. I've split the big filesystem into two DLEs that I'll dump with tar. I've fixed the amanda.conf file to account for all the new tapes and set tpchanger to chg-manual. We are running 2.4.4p2. I'm asking this question because I hate surprises. The existing tapes are Daily001 ... Daily013. I've got 13 blank tapes to add to the pool. I assume I need to label these myself. I'd like each dump to use consecutive tapes (Daily001 Daily002). I doubt this will happen. What should I expect to see? In general how will I know which is the next tape it wants? Do I get this from the report of the previous dump or does the changer tell me which tape to insert? Are there any surprises in store for me? I'm hoping this is a quick and easy change but I such a beast is rare. Thanks. -- Joel Coltoff It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity. -- Albert E. Einstein
Re: going from 1 tape to 2
On Friday 30 January 2004 13:13, Joel Coltoff wrote: Hi, We've gotten to the point where Amanda now needs multiple tapes. Our other systems crossed that point years ago. I've split the big filesystem into two DLEs that I'll dump with tar. I've fixed the amanda.conf file to account for all the new tapes and set tpchanger to chg-manual. We are running 2.4.4p2. I'm asking this question because I hate surprises. The existing tapes are Daily001 ... Daily013. I've got 13 blank tapes to add to the pool. I assume I need to label these myself. I'd like each dump to use consecutive tapes (Daily001 Daily002). I doubt this will happen. What should I expect to see? In general how will I know which is the next tape it wants? Do I get this from the report of the previous dump or does the changer tell me which tape to insert? Are there any surprises in store for me? I'm hoping this is a quick and easy change but I such a beast is rare. Thanks. Yes, you'll have to label the tape using amlabel, see its man page. Bear in mind that when using runtapes 1 it helps quite a bit to break the individual dle's down into manageable sized hunks of data compared to the total tape size. I use DDS2's here, and to help amanda adjust her schedueling, I long ago tried to keep any one dle under a gigabyte. If I have iso images of a linux distro to keep, each disks iso is a seperate entry in the disklist. When running multiple tapes, when it hits EOT nad goes for the next tape, recall it doesn't span the file, but restarts the failed file from byte 0. You waste a lot more space with 3gig files(dle's) than with 700 meggers when this happens. I suppose that since I now have dsl, and this stuff is much more readily available, I really should take that stuff out of my disklist. Force of habit when I was on a #@()*^$# dialup I had to call a surveyer to set stakes and measure the speed of. :-) -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
Re: going from 1 tape to 2
On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 01:13:36PM -0500, Joel Coltoff wrote: Hi, We've gotten to the point where Amanda now needs multiple tapes. Our other systems crossed that point years ago. I've split the big filesystem into two DLEs that I'll dump with tar. I've fixed the amanda.conf file to account for all the new tapes and set tpchanger to chg-manual. We are running 2.4.4p2. I'm asking this question because I hate surprises. The existing tapes are Daily001 ... Daily013. I've got 13 blank tapes to add to the pool. I assume I need to label these myself. I'd like each dump to use consecutive tapes (Daily001 Daily002). I doubt this will happen. What should I expect to see? In general how will I know which is the next tape it wants? Do I get this from the report of the previous dump or does the changer tell me which tape to insert? Are there any surprises in store for me? I'm hoping this is a quick and easy change but I such a beast is rare. I have runtapes set to 2. Note, that is the maximum number of tapes it will use. If the day's dump fits in one, that is all it uses. But the tape order does not change. Here are the first two lines from my nightly report last evening: These dumps were to tape DS1-12. The next 2 tapes Amanda expects to used are: DS1-13, DS1-14. amcheck has a similar set of lines. so does amflush when you use it. Yes, you do need to label the new tapes yourself, that is no different than when amanda was setup. It can't devine what labels you want. One way to do the change over is to set runtapes to 2, maybe even 3 as it will not use more than it needs, but do not reset your tapecycle parameter. Leave it at 13, at least for now. Then label your tapes. amanda will always take a new, properly labelled tape, but if you increase the tapecycle parameter, it will insist on a new one. Then, assuming you label them 14 - 26, after tape 13 is used, start feeding new tapes. After all 13 new ones are in use, you can think about changing tapecycle. Or not. I keep tapecycle a little lower than the number actually in use. Then if one goes bad, it will use the next one in turn. Should you want to keep all your current dumps for the total tapecycle, think about labelling the new ones 1b to 13b. Then when it asks for tape 2 (after tape 1 has just been overwritten) feed it the new tape 1b. Now you are going in pairs 1 and 1b, 2 and 2b, ... Problem with that is the one day amanda only needs a single tape. Then your pairs are 3b and 4, 4b and 5, ... -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
Re: going from 1 tape to 2
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 at 1:13pm, Joel Coltoff wrote We've gotten to the point where Amanda now needs multiple tapes. Our other systems crossed that point years ago. I've split the big filesystem into two DLEs that I'll dump with tar. I've fixed the amanda.conf file to account for all the new tapes and set tpchanger to chg-manual. We are running 2.4.4p2. I don't think you can use chg-manual with cron launched jobs. It needs a tty to bind to, so that it can ask for the next tape and you can tell it when you've loaded it. I'm asking this question because I hate surprises. The existing tapes are Daily001 ... Daily013. I've got 13 blank tapes to add to the pool. I assume I need to label these myself. I'd like each dump to use Yes. consecutive tapes (Daily001 Daily002). I doubt this will happen. What should I expect to see? In general how will I know which is the next tape it wants? Do I get this from the report of the previous dump or does the changer tell me which tape to insert? Are there any surprises in store for me? I'm hoping this is a quick and easy change but I such a beast is rare. Whenever you increase the tapecycle, amanda will demand new tapes be amlabelled and used before it will start re-using the old tapes. So whereever you are in your cycle now, the new tapes will be inserted. To avoid this, change the tapecycle back to 13 until you run (or are about to run) a dump to Daily013. Say the next two tapes to be used are Daily013 and Daily001. At this point, increase tapecycle to 14 and amlabel Daily014. That night's dumps will then go to Daily013 and Daily014. The next day, increase tapecycle to 16 and label Daily015 and Daily016. Etc until all your new tapes are labelled and used. I don't have any experience with chg-manual, but I imagine it will tell you what tape it wants. Good luck. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
