[Dan Olsen]

Ah, okay. It sounds like we may be experiencing a somewhat similar issue, or at least similar symptoms. When the drive is operating normally, it “whines”, whizzes, etc, constantly for long periods of time–sounds like it is constantly doing work, moving through tape. Great!

When its having issues, it will whine, slow down, stop, make a knocking/clacking/repositioning noise, then whine up again, and repeat every few minutes or more, each time interrupting the job’s progress. Recently, its doing less of the knocking/clacking and just whining and stopping over a period of a few seconds–i.e. if running a verify pass, it will whine, verify maybe 1 or 2GB, slow down, whine through another GB or 2, and repeat. Both behaviors have happened with both drives (auto loader has two LTO-6 drives.

As far as other issues with the autoloader, the single biggest problem and persisting issue is that the autoloader reports that a tape is full when it is not. I always load/allocate the right number of tapes for a job, and over the course of the 2+ years we’ve had the autoloader, I’ve regularly arrived in the morning to find a prompt for more tapes. The autoloader will mark a tape full when its written only 200GB, 500GB, 1TB, etc.–varying amounts. This is definitely an error because if I load one of the “full” tapes back in, BRU will continue to write to it–but then the volumes for the job get all screwy. Completely unpredictable behavior. I cancel and restart the job each time this happens, and most times the 2nd attempt completes successfully–the exact same media from the same storage, everything the same. So definitely an issue with the hardware or BRU PE.

Beyond that, just incredibly inconsistent speeds, jobs just stalling out during the write or verify–all things that point to issues with the drives, and it has been very persistent since the machine arrived. I’m not sure if the robotics in the library are just significantly more fragile or what, but its caused me to at times want to abandon the entire ~$10K investment and go back to standalone drives since they were more reliable–or maybe they aren’t!

It’s been the most frustrating issue we’ve ever had to deal with by far.

[Dan Olsen]

Hey James–when your drive is experiencing slow reads, have you noticed if its making more noise, or different sounds, than it does during normal operations?

[Dan Olsen]

Thanks James, and good luck with HPE. I spent weeks trying to work with their tech support and in the end they wouldn’t even acknowledge that their hardware was compatible with BRU PE (I believe the HPE docs list BRU Server, but not BRU PE)–which obviously isn’t true because TOLIS (& Archiware, YoYotta, etc I’m sure) works with HPE reps–but their lower to mid-level support personnel are severely misinformed on some of the applications of their hardware. Rather than working on the problem, I was spending time trying to have them understand what I was trying to do and that it was a known & accepted practice, which ultimately they did not buy into at all. We never reached a solution.

It was then that we ditched the HPE branded MSL2024 and got a TOLIS library with their firmware, so that support for software & hardware could come from the same place. The nightmare of working with HPE’s general tech support is gone, but unfortunately we’re still having a lot of issues with the library.

When the library is working properly, which it has for months at a time, it is fantastic. But I definitely would not say that it is anywhere near as stable as the rock solid performance I had with 2x LTO-5 standalone drives for many years. I’m actually in the process of ordering a cube from TOLIS with 2x standalone LTO-6 drives supplant the library when it isn’t functioning properly. Not ideal to spend that money, but I still think TOLIS is the best option, and we quite literally can’t afford to have our backup/archive system down as much as it has been with the library. Hoping the standalone/cube is of the same stability that we’re used to.

I truly hope you have more success with HPE support than I did!

[Dan Olsen]

Thanks David, I appreciate the response. Unfortunately, all of these issues continue to persist despite working closely with TOLIS support from day one. Sometimes I’ll go months with the library just churning through archives and being well worth the price tag, but I’ve also hit strides of weeks or months where one issue or another is totally impeding my ability to archive media.

With the standalone LTO-5 drives, contacting support was extremely rare and usually for a minor issue. With this library, troubleshooting has pretty much become a staple of my workday.

[Dan Olsen]

Should also note that I removed & re-installed BRU PE using the current package on the downloads page and the user/pass worked fine authenticating for the installation, still no such luck when opening the app though.

[Dan Olsen]

Thanks Andy, I have opened a support ticket with TOLIS, those guys are great and incredibly knowledgable, and the fact that they are savvy on the software and hardware side is hugely important. I’ve dealt with finger pointing between software and hardware vendors (HPE support is the worst!) concerning LTO in the past and it was one of the most frustrating situations I’ve ever dealt with in my professional career.

Anyway, waiting to hear back from them. I don’t think it had anything to do with a security update–running BRU PE is this mac’s only job, so I never run any updates unless TOLIS explicitly suggests such. Seems like Apple’s changes have been causing them quite a headache recently.

[Dan Olsen]

No, no update yet, at least not from a “fix” standpoint.

I will mention that I have never changed the admin user name or pass on my mac running BRU PE, so this is not a case of BRU PE wanting the user/pass for when the app was initially installed. I also tried opening an earlier version of BRU PE hoping that it wasn’t affected, but it appears that it is–3.1.18 had always been relatively stable for me, but now that version is rejecting my user/pass as well.

FWIW, I’m also running Yosemite 10.10.5.

[Dan Olsen]

The scary thing is that I know for a fact that the admin user/pass has never, ever changed on the mac running BRU PE. It’s the only user account on the machine as well. New version was installed and all of a sudden the log-in doesn’t work.

Really hope this can be fixed, don’t much like a warning that some files may be skipped during my archives, even if the permissions on the storage seem to be set correctly to avoid that.

[Dan Olsen]

Exact same issue here. Cannot get BRU PE to authenticate despite having the correct user name and password.

[Dan Olsen]

Thanks Tim, I’m actually on 10.10.5