We have a couple of Alpha servers both of which have HP C1553 tape drives (6
tape autochanger) attached. We use these as backup servers for a range of Unix
machines in the department, using dump/rdump. We recently changed one of the
servers from Digital Unix 3.2 to 4.0. Since then we have had various problems
with the tape device. It's not happy reading back tapes which were created
under 3.2, especially those which were dumps of the local disks on the Alpha.
Also some architectures will not longer remotely dump to the Alpha, or take a
lot longer to do so. It seems related to the blocking factor used with the
dump/rdump command. Before we go and install 4.0 on the other Alpha we need to
find what's going on, otherwise we will be left with a whole load of backup
tapes which we can't read any more. We have tried various things, like swapping
the physical drives, and eliminating the autochanger so that it's just using a
single tape, but all to no effect.
Can anyone suggest what could be happening here, and what we need to do to
ensure that all our tapes dumped under 3.2 can still be accessed, and that new
dumps work from all other machine types.
--
Hugh M. Conner
Computing & Electrical Eng.
Heriot-Watt University
hmc_at_cee.hw.ac.uk
Received on Mon Feb 02 1998 - 17:58:31 NZDT