Posts tagged “oops”

October 03, 2009 Eject, *then* reboot
Ran into a little problem this week when I tried to do a restore from a backup at work. Bacula loaded the tape, then said it couldn't read the label. Wha?

After much investigation, during which I completely neglected to cut-n-paste the error messages, I think I've figured out what happened:
- I upgraded the license key for our storage library;
- I rebooted the library, 'cos that's what you gotta do;
- but the tape was still in there, say halfway through after the last batch of backups;
- so the drive rewound the tape after being power-cycled;
- and Bacula didn't know this;
- so it wrote the next backups that night at the beginning of the tape, not realizing this would be a Bad Thing(tm).
Ack. Needless to say, this was not good. Fortunately, the file in question was not a terribly important one; unfortunately, that's about the last 2 weeks of incrementals gone. Lesson learned: don't assume your backup program knows what's going on when hardware reboots from under it.

In other news: on Thursday I got 5 new Dell servers. Woot! One of 'em will be our new LDAP/web/email/FTP server (Xen ftw!); the rest are going to be running protein search engines for various researchers across BC. They're racked and I'm stoked, except that it turns out the difference between the DRAC6 Express and Enterprise, besides a few hundred dollars, is that the Enterprise does console redirection and the Express doesn't. Dammit.

I'm going to see if there's any trickery that can be done, but I'm not holding out hope. I have got a 32-port console server, but it's two racks away...might have to run a small batch o' cables up and over to make this work.