[1224] in SIPB-AFS-requests
8mm tape drive failing; AFS backup was not done
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mhpower@MIT.EDU)
Tue Feb 1 01:16:13 1994
From: mhpower@MIT.EDU
To: sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU
Cc: charon-maintainers@MIT.EDU, rtfm-maintainers@MIT.EDU, sipb-staff@MIT.EDU,
sipb-ec@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 94 01:15:36 EST
I wasn't able to finish any part of the AFS backup tonight because
butc failed with a tape I/O error on five different tapes (trying to
back up two different volume sets). Three of the attempts failed
within a hour, but the other two ran over two hours each, copying all
of ronald-ann b,c except for project.clisp, project.tcshdev, and
project.sipb.sun. It's possible that the latter two failures were an
incorrect reporting of "No space left on device", but this doesn't
seem all that likely, and in any case there's at least an intermittent
problem with the drive (or bad batches of tapes).
There were also a few tape I/O errors last week, but the backup
succeeded after running the "Exabyte 8mm Cleaning Tape -- 3 Cleanings"
for its fourth (or nth) cleaning. That didn't work this week.
I think we need some better approach to cleaning the tape drive before
we do any more backups on it. The OFFICE.CATALOG file in the
vmlistserv locker (or anonymous ftp to mitvma in listserv.193) doesn't
seem to have been updated since November 5, but it has an entry
110477 TAPE, 8mm EXABYTE CLEANING $ 26.50 EA
jsl tells me that he's seen 8mm cleaning tapes for sale that are
intended to work for more than 3 cleanings; if the above one from Lab
Supplies is like this, we might only need to buy one of them.
Does anyone have any suggestions about this? Should we buy a new
cleaning tape as soon as possible (e.g., before next week's meeting),
is there any other useful method of cleaning the relevant parts of the
drive, should we be trying to use rosebud's 8mm tape drive instead?
Matt
