How do I use cleaning tape in LTO drive with Arkeia?
 

I can create the tape, as a cleaning tape, and everything. It even lets me specify max # of uses, and what # use its on now. , etc.

But When the tape is in the drive, Arkeia says there is not tape in the drive (for the cleaning tape only).

There is no option anywhere to use the cleaning tape.

The only thing I can find ANYWHERE in arkeia's user guide, forums, and knowledge base is this:

http://support.arkeia.com/cgi-bin/ar...YWdlPTE*&p_li=

Which tells you in detail how to set up cleaning tapes in libraries. But I have no library -- just a single LTO Ultrium 1 tape drive.


BTW I am using Arkeia Network Backup 5.2.25.



Is there something I am completely missing here? Do I not have to do anything in arkeia? Do I just stick the tape in and it cleans and then is done or something? That’s the only thing I can think of for why I can find no documentation on using cleaning tapes in non-library setups.





Also - as side note - Seagate originally make my tape drive, but they don’t make them anymore, and provide absolutely no support -- so I can even find a manual to tell me what lights on the drive means what? Are there by chance standard lights/meaning on LTO drives?

Anything you could tell me at all would help immensely. I am about to pull me hair out I'm so frustrated.

Maybe the st command with the stsetcln option may work for you. never tried it but may have to one day myself. I don't do a lot of tape backup so haven't run into this yet.

http://man.linuxquestions.org/index....ction=0&type=2

Brian1

Thanks for the pointer, I tried it, but unfortunately it had no apparent effect. (tape drive seemed to do nothing, and there was no screen output (also no change in Arkeia's apparent lack of support for cleaning tapes in non-library implementations))

I think I am supposed to use some arguments after "mt stsetcln" to set the "cleaning request interpretation parameters" whatever those may be.

I even 'man mt | grep clean' and the only result was that one stsetcln line.

Does anybody know if there are any other 'main' commands having to do with scsi tape drives, or what exactly "cleaning request interpretation parameters" are, and if setting them a certain way might help to use the cleaning tape.



Also as a side note to all - I suppose this probably goes without saying, but since my original post asked specifically about Arkeia - i just want to be clear that I don't care necessarily that Arkeia does the cleaning tape or even be aware of it (though that would be very nice(though having an entirely different and open source tape backup solution would be nice too)) -- If somebody can tell me just how to get the tape drive to run the cleaning tape. Like maybe how entirely I can get the mt command to attempt to read the tape for a while, so that it rubs on the heads. Or, even installing something else, that will allow me to use the cleaning tape. (a simple command line app would be preferred to gui, as I spend all my time in the command line world and currently only use X for accessing the Arkeia interface when necessary)


Also does anybody know of a good open source (and therefore well documented on the internet) tape backup system, that can do network backups. (preferably commandine/config file based, unless its a good gui/app, thats worth it) --- Also preferably a simpler one, to a more complex one. Im only backing up two servers, Full/Incremental.

Also I want to ask if anyone knows if there is any more risk of data corruption with incremental backups over a month, as compared to differential. I know that incremental takes longer to restore, but that's not near as much an issue in my situation, as data integrity.

I seen a different man file somewhre that said something like
' mt stsetcln 0 ' or maybe one can try ' mt stsetcln 1 ' or higher value. Not sure what the value is seconds minutes or something like goto end.

Brian1