-- CraigStrachan - 22 Jan 2021

Dealing with a Missing Tape

Since the introduction of the new tape library, TiBS will occasionally ask for a tape which is not present in the library to be mounted. This normally happens when an account which has been inactive for some time is reactivated. TiBS needs access to the last full backup of the account in order to create a new synthetic full backup. It would be possible of course to simply extract the tape from the old library and stick it in the new one but to save a trip to KB, there is another way of dealing with this. Run the tibstat command and look for lines beginning BUSYVOL - meaning a volume that is currently being processed. Assuming that the backups have been running or some time, the only BUSYVOL should be the volume which is causing the tape request. Run the command hostexpire -l afs-full -n afs -p < VOLUME NAME > -x . This will expire all the current backups of the volume and make TiBS do a new full backup on its next run. You will be asked to confirm this action. Do so.

To allow the backups to finish, you will need to kill the process which is requesting the tape. In the tibstat output, look for a teramerge command. There should only be one and it should include the number of the tape that is being requested (the TiBS tape label number that is, not the barcode). Kill this process and the backups should finish as normal.

-- CraigStrachan - 22 Jan 2021