ARGH-gust - Tape Edition

Well that was an eventful month, and not in a good way. Mostly it was a 50/50 of self-inflicted, and just bad timing. 

The first issue I ran into is that I had a tape "die". The MSL 2024 Library I'm using reported the tape as "bad" but didn't give a good description of what the problem is, so I don't know if its a temp thing, like the head got misaligned and the tape ran out too soon, or if its a more permanent thing like the magnetic stripe of the tape is torn. I spent several days trying to figure out what the issue actually was before just removing the tape and attempting to move on. 

This did not work as well as I thought it would. After removing the tape I tried to restart a backup that had failed due to the tape issue, to which Bacula/Bacularis said "Lets use {broken and removed tape}!" and hung trying to reinsert the now missing tape into the tape drive. Which got me no farther then I was when the library had reported the tape as bad. Finally, after figuring out how to mark the tape as "disabled" in Bacula it proceed to write the backup that I had expected it to write several days before. I only marked the tape as "disabled" because when I get time I would like to further investigate the issue that the library has with the tape, if its just a data thing(misaligned header blocks) I'm hoping that I can fix the tape and bring it back into circulation.

The second issue that arose was my own fault...I think. While doing research for the last post I wiped the label information for one of the tapes in the library. This lead to Bacularis returning an error when it tried to next use that tape. My attempts to have it re-label the volume cause a sync(?) issue between the library and Bacula. This left the setup in a similar state to the one that was above, except that the library wasn't reporting an error on the tape. So I spent an egregious amount of time trying to fix the tape, eventually just giving up on the fix, and disabling the tape instead. After disabling the tape, and many restarts of both the bacula host, and the library, I finally was able to get the backup to run again, and took long enough to write this up that the scheduled backup has also now run. Both were successful, so I think I'm in the clear.

So to sum it up, this month has been full of frustration, at least in regards to the MSL Tape Library. I'm hoping that next month will be better, and less eventful. Yet only time will tell.