cartridges requested out of order?

Hi all,

I'm slightly confused by afbackup's cartridge ordering. (-:
We use one cartridge set for full backps and incremental backups;
these are 23 DLT tapes, and a changer for 7 tapes. We have been using
afbackup for 4 months now, and all looked well until it started to
request cartridges out of our (perceived) order.

It started with a full backup that should go to cartridge 10 and span
over to nr. 11. It didn't use cartridge 11, instead it requested that
cartridge 18 be put into the changer. Slightly worried, I did that,
and the backup continued; after 18, it used cartridge 11, and
continued counting up, until it finished with cartridge 12. Now, it
requests cartridge 2. We always used the cartridges in numerical order
and there are no extra precious tapes for any clients (afaict), so I'd
expect that afbackup expires & re-uses cartridges in the same order.

Some data files that confused me:

ikarus:/opt/afbackup/server# cat  var/cartridge_order 
2 -> 0 0
3 -> 4 1
4 -> 5 1
5 -> 6 1
6 -> 7 1
7 -> 8 1
8 -> 9 1
9 -> 10 1
10 -> 3 1
11 -> 12 1
12 -> 13 1
13 -> 14 1
14 -> 15 1
15 -> 16 1
16 -> 17 1
17 -> 18 1
18 -> 11 1
19 -> 20 1
20 -> 21 1
21 -> 22 1
22 -> 23 1
23 -> 1 1
ikarus:/opt/afbackup/server# cat var/tape_uses 
2: 1
3: 2
4: 2
5: 2
6: 2
7: 2
8: 2
9: 3
10: 2
11: 3
12: 6
13: 1
14: 1
15: 1
16: 1
17: 1
18: 2
19: 1
20: 1
21: 1
22: 1
23: 1
ikarus:/opt/afbackup/server# cat  var/precious_tapes 
ikarus 6-9,18,11-12
marx 10-23,1,3-8
maxwell 4-8,18,11-12
minos 5-9,18,11-12

Why does it want cartridge 2, then? Of course, it isn't precious, but
13 isn't, either!  I'd really prefer not having to travel to the tape
changer during weekends, so any help is appreciated (-:

Thanks,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <[email protected]>, [email protected], antifuchs


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