NOTE: this problem may not be a problem. After rebooting the system while having the tape library powered up, the problem went away. This may or may not be coincident.
Note to self: mtx-changer needs more customization than I thought.
Today showed great progress in completing the integration of my tape library into my Bacula system. I have been writing the testing and configuration of supporting tools. I had moved onto a new article outlining the integration phase (still under construction). That’s when I found a pretty big block in the mtx-changer script. It is this function:
#
# The purpose of this function to wait a maximum
# time for the drive. It will
# return as soon as the drive is ready, or after
# waiting a maximum of 300 seconds.
# Note, this is very system dependent, so if you are
# not running on Linux, you will probably need to
# re-write it, or at least change the grep target.
# We've attempted to get the appropriate OS grep targets
# in the code at the top of this script.
#
wait_for_drive() {
i=0
while [ $i -le 300 ]; do # Wait max 300 seconds
if mt -f $1 status 2>&1 | grep "${ready}" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
break
fi
debug "Device $1 - not ready, retrying..."
sleep 1
i=`expr $i + 1`
done
}
The problem is, when bacula-sd is running, you cannot get the status of the tape drive. At least with my system. It is *always* busy. This, this function always times out.
For example:
$ sudo mtx -f /dev/nsa1 status cannot open SCSI device '/dev/nsa1' - Device busy
My solution, yet to be tested:
wait_for_drive() {
debug "waiting for Device $1"
sleep 25
}
We’ll see.
