Re: Ontape Level 0 Archive Aborts Itself....

MS CARLEEN C AVANT wrote: > > Hi, > Hoping someone can shed some light on the following. We are running > Informix ODS 7.24.UC2 on Sun Ultra Enterprise 4000 utilizing Solaris > 2.6 > We are using an Exabyte EXB-8500 tape drive; 8mm Helical Scan 7GB > uncompressed tape. Pardon my skepticism but I suspect a 7GB tape means that you *could* write 7GB on the tape if you didn't need to separate the tape blocks. Once you have blocks, each gap loses a certain amount of tape capacity. I don't really know how the hardware works these days (I really know that 20 years ago, right?) but this used to be called the "interblock gap". > We have the following in our onconfig: > TAPEDEV /dev/rmt/0mb > TAPEBLK 1024 > TAPESIZE 6809600. Where's y'all come up with that number? Probably trying to account for those gaps. So let's try a TAPESIZE of 6000000 and see if that helps. > A few days ago we loaded the remainder of our production data. We were > able to get one successful 0 level archive. It prompted for a second > tape (for the first time since migration) with no problem. Yesterday > we received OS Error #28....no space left on device. The Informix > message log states > "internal subsystem error...archive aborted by client". > It never prompted for an additional tape. HMmm... This is a symptom of a compressed drive not able to get the compressed capacity expected. I believe on AIX systems ALL the tape devices in /dev are compressed drives. I wonder how this applies to your Solaris system. My suggestion about lowering the TAPEDEV to 6000000 still goes but it's grounded in intuiton, not hard numbers. > The system administrator has reviewed the documentation regarding tape > drive, tapes, etc. for our platform and can find nothing specific > pointing to a problem. Are we overlooking anything here? Perhaps any > bugs of which we are unaware? Would appreciate any feedback in trying > to resolve this issue so we can obtain a good level 0 archive. Thanks > for your help. I wonder if there is a patch for a tape driver problem. My suspicion lies with the tape driver. -- -- Jake (Retrospectively realizes there is no future in hindsight) +------------------------------------------------------------+ | The expedient performance of a task with excessive concern | | regarding its duration-to-completion engenders a virtual | | certainty of diminished benefit therefrom. | | -- Benjamin Franklin (but he said it in 3 words) | +------------------------------------------------------------+