Told to equate achievement with pain.
May. 7th, 2004 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reddragdivaYou have a stack of tapes this high to be loaded. You have three tape drives. You put a tape into one drive. You take it out because it won't read. You put another tape in after it and the drive jams.
You put the initial tape that won't read into another drive and it won't read there either. You take it out and put it in a third drive with the same result. Subsequent tapes in each of these drives (it must be the drives) jam as well. You call helpdesk complaining about our crappy support.
After much back and forth, it emerges that you ignored the lack of a green light and forced the dud tape — a DLT that had dropped its leader — from each of the three drives in turn. Thus breaking them. And meaning you have no more tape drives for the stack of tapes this high you have to load. WELL DONE!
They're lucky we had a spare drive to hand. "Please don't break this one." I really hope the vendor invalidates the warranty on grounds of equipment abuse and they get the bill.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 09:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 09:38 am (UTC)They're quite usably reliable when the users aren't actively BREAKING THE EQUIPMENT.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 09:45 am (UTC)Sounds rather familiar; we have the same issue with satellite imagary. Sometimes it works out faster and cheaper to fly a server with attached RAID array across... along with a person to support it!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 11:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 09:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 10:20 am (UTC)I'm thinking of going in the tape direction perhaps you can recommend some equipment? ... I'd rather not be changing tapes all day long!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 10:36 am (UTC)Network Appliance is your friend.
Well, okay, they're MY friend, but that's because we managed to score a NearStore r150-- 12TB of live RAID backup, including lots of neat things like real-time mirroring and the ability to do all kinds of backups and, I believe, to look like a tape drive to Veritas (although we don't do that).
I HIGHLY recommend NetApp gear. Not cheap up-front, but it'll save you LOTS of time.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 01:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-10 11:24 am (UTC)We're using a robot with a 17 slot magazine feeding two LTO drives. This is to back up 0.5 TB at the moment, scaling to about 2TB before we need to upgrade.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 10:34 am (UTC)Ah, your tape-monkeys did that for you too? We only lost two DLT drives in our little lost-leader fiasco, but that's because we only had two drives to lost.
Turns out we'd been using the same DLTs for daily backups since, um, 1997. We had a mighty purging of all tapes that have been in rotation for more than a year, and things have been marginally okay since then. I hate DLTs...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 12:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 12:03 pm (UTC)Sheesh.
At least ours has the excuse of being the guy whose father-in-law used to be VP of the division, but who doesn't have enough skills (or ambition) to move beyond front-desk-and-tape-monkeying...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 10:36 am (UTC)Worthy of crossposting into
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-07 07:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-08 02:22 am (UTC)