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Cache-A Pro-Cache5 Stopped Writing Tapes – Tape acts artificially “full”
I know ProMax officially ended support for Cache-A systems last month, but we had our Pro-Cache5 in for an $850 repair just before the end of support, and now it’s already having issues again. (Unrelated symptoms.)
We are a not for profit charitable organization, and we cannot afford a replacement LTO appliance until our next fiscal year starts in July.I believe this to be a simple problem this time, I just don’t know how to resolve it or what caused it.
I can no longer successfully write tapes. I can load them, read them, erase them, rename them, but any write operation I try immediately ejects the tape and says “Remove the ejected tape and insert the next tape for this volume.”
It is acting as though it thinks the tape is full when it has only just begun the operation. I’ve tried with 5 brand new tapes, I’ve rebooted, I’ve SSH’d in to stop and re-start all services, and I cannot get any other outcome. If I insert “the next tape for this volume” as it is asking it just does the same thing again with the new blank tape.
It seems to write some or all of the folders and very tiny files like thumbs.db, etc, but as soon as it reaches anything of real size appears to be when it decides to eject and give me this message.
Could anybody please offer some advice? Even just pointing me towards a support article? Google is giving me nothing…
Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television -
2 Replies
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Ed, that is strange behavior indeed.
First, I suggest you turn off tape spanning, at least until the issue is resolved. To look into this, I’d need to know if you are having the issue with both LTFS and tar, and what the catalog and tape info say about these tapes that are ejected.
I suggest you generate a log file (Diagnostic Summary tab) and send this info to me directly at the address below and I’ll do what I can to help you.
Tom Goldberg
TGCS
30201 Rainbow Hill Rd.
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tomgoldberg@gmail.com
https://tomgoldberg.net -
Hi Tom, thank you very much for your response and offer to help!
I’m generating the log file for you now, but please note that in attempting to resolve this issue, I have been deleting the irrelevant tapes from the catalog in hopes that would take it’s out of it’s ‘infinite loop’ of wanting to span to another tape. I believe it looks like there is one still in there that I just attempted to use, so maybe that helps. I can continue to recreate the error and send you an updated log after several more attempts if you think that’s helpful.
We have about 134 tapes in our catalog (67 plus their duplicates) and they are all tar, not LTFS.
I’ll gladly turn off tape spanning because I’ve never used it and I don’t want to – I don’t trust it. I have always staged my volumes in 1.4TB chunks so they each fit nicely on one tape.
But I don’t see where to turn it off… Is it the ‘Multiple Volumes’ option under that main configuration settings?
Thank you!!!
Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television
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