Re: Bacula or Drive problem?

Bill Arlofski via Bacula-users <[email protected]> Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:03:37 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.bacula.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 6/12/25 1:43 AM, Dr. Thorsten Brandau via Bacula-users wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am using a Neo 24 Tape library with an LTO-9 drive.
> 
> The old one (Tandberg) broke recently and was replaced with a different
> one. Then the backups with Bacula worked fine for some time. Now I get
> those errors (again):
> 
> 12-Jun 09:31 -dir JobId 1458: shell command: run BeforeJob "/usr/libexec/bacula/make_catalog_backup.pl MyCatalog"
> 12-Jun 09:31 -dir JobId 1458: BeforeJob: mysqldump: Deprecated program name. It will be removed in a future release, use '/usr/bin/mariadb-dump' instead
> 12-Jun 09:32 -dir JobId 1458: Start Backup JobId 1458, Job=BackupCatalog.2025-06-12_09.31.24_24
> 12-Jun 09:32 -dir JobId 1458: Using Device "LTO9-1" to write.
> 12-Jun 09:32 -sd JobId 1458: 3991 Bad autochanger "loaded? drive 0" command: ERR=Child exited with code 1.
> Results=mtx: Request Sense: Long Report=yes
> mtx: Request Sense: Valid Residual=no
> mtx: Request Sense: Error Code=70 (Current)
> m
tx: Request Sense: Sense Key=Illegal Request
> mtx: Request Sense: FileMark=no
> mtx: Request Sense: EOM=no
> mtx: Request Sense: ILI=no
> mtx: Request Sense: Additional Sense Code = 20
> mtx: Request Sense: Additional Sense Qualifier = 00
> mtx: Request Sense: Field in Error = 00
> mtx: Request Sense: BPV=no
> mtx: Request Sense: Error in CDB=yes
> mtx: Request Sense: SKSV=yes
> mtx: Request Sense: Field Pointer = 00 00
> READ ELEMENT STATUS Command Failed
> 
> 
> No backup possible ("Fatal Error").
> 
> I do not know if this may be caused by Bacual or by the tape itself. Vendor says I must clean, however, the library is set to "autoclean" and a cleaning tape is available. I changed the cleaning tape to a new one, manually cleaned twice and tried again to backup with identical (errorous) result.
> 
> Any idea how to trace the problem to the tape or software? What to do?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Thorsten

Hello Thorsten,

This is a problem with the tape library.  
In this moment, Bacula has simply called the `mtx-changer` script, which in turn 
calls the `mtx` utility to request a `mtx -f /dev/your/tape/library/node status` so that Bacula can klnow if the drive has a 
tape in it.

The mtx command is failing.

This can be proven by stopping the SD, and running the mtx status command as the bacula user from the command line:

# sudo -u bacula mtx -f /dev/your/tape/library/node status


Also, Bacula and a tape library's autoclean feature are not compatible and can be very dangerous - up to and including 
possible data loss.

If you are interested in (beta?) testing a script I wrote as a drop-in replacement for the default `mtx-changer` script, it 
has excellent logging, a feature to detect and report if a tape drive requires cleaning, and another feature that can be 
enabled to automatically clean the drive.

It is called `mtx-changer-python` and may be found in my Github account here: https://github.com/waa

P.S. My `bacula-tap
ealert` drop-in replacement for the default `tapealert` script might also be of interest to you. ;)



Hope this helps,
Bill

-- 
Bill Arlofski
[email protected]

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