tape media in wrong drive / no automatic unload

[guerby]

Hi,

Using PBS 3.1.2 with Dell TL-4000 library with 3 drives, when the next available tape in the media pool for a job is already loaded in a drive but not the drive set for the job it seems that PBS doesn't unload by itself but rather asks for the user to do it.

Here the job is set up for drivenum 1 ("drive2") and the next available tape '000039L7' is in drivenum 2 ("drive3") we get:

2024-01-10T14:59:14+01:00: allocated new writable media '000039L7'
2024-01-10T14:59:14+01:00: trying to load media '000039L7' into drive 'drive2'
2024-01-10T14:59:15+01:00: could not load tape into drive - unable to load media '000039L7' - media in wrong drive (2 != 1)
2024-01-10T14:59:15+01:00: Please insert media '000039L7' into changer 'ibm-3573-tl'

The job is stuck there until I manually unload the tape '000039L7' from drivenum 2 ("drive3"), then after a few minutes it loads the wanted tape into the right drive and continues the job successfully.

2024-01-10T15:16:02+01:00: found media label 000039L7 (1442ed7c-761f-4aef-b4ae-f6c8d2fbb304)
2024-01-10T15:16:02+01:00: writing new media set label
2024-01-10T15:16:07+01:00: moving to end of media
2024-01-10T15:16:09+01:00: arrived at end of media
2024-01-10T15:16:18+01:00: wrote 1423 chunks (1955.33 MB at 227.50 MB/s)
...

I'm just discovering the tape world through PBS, I don't know if this is expected or not from a tape backup software not to unload by itself.

Thanks!

 

[dcsapak]

hi, this is not unexpected, since i think the idea was that the tape was loaded in the drive for a reason.
e.g. if you manually do something with it, i guess you don't want to have it suddenly unloaded just because the job was started..

you can set the jobs to eject the tapes from the drives after a job, so they don't linger there, then the backup job can load it automatically

 

[guerby]

hi, this is not unexpected, since i think the idea was that the tape was loaded in the drive for a reason.
e.g. if you manually do something with it, i guess you don't want to have it suddenly unloaded just because the job was started..

you can set the jobs to eject the tapes from the drives after a job, so they don't linger there, then the backup job can load it automatically

In this case I loaded the tape in the drive to label it to expand the media pool so that the next backup job would have a media to use.

I guess I have to remember to unload when I do format and label tapes (the nice thing about having multiple drives is that you can work while a backup job is running