{"id":344,"date":"2009-04-26T18:52:41","date_gmt":"2009-04-26T08:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=344"},"modified":"2018-12-12T16:19:27","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T06:19:27","slug":"meet-your-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/04\/26\/meet-your-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet your library"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For larger sites in particular, we frequently end up in situations where backup or system administrators are sufficiently remote from the datacentre that they rarely interact with servers &#8220;face to face&#8221;. As remote management features continue to advance, allowing interaction with pseudo-shutdown servers and devices, this will only increase.<\/p>\n<p>This level of remoteness can create unrealistic expectation of operation performance, particularly when the chips are down and something (e.g., a recovery) needs to be done urgently.<\/p>\n<p>So there&#8217;s something very important you should do with your tape libraries \u2013 you should meet them. By meeting them, I mean the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sit in front of them, with a laptop or console.<\/li>\n<li>Make sure you can <em>hear<\/em> the library in operation.<\/li>\n<li>Run at least the following commands:\n<ul>\n<li>Load;<\/li>\n<li>Unload;<\/li>\n<li>Relabel;<\/li>\n<li>Inventory;<\/li>\n<li>Import;<\/li>\n<li>Device clean;<\/li>\n<li>Export.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>If possible, also do the following:\n<ul>\n<li>Monitor how long it takes media to rewind and become available for eject once EOM is reached;<\/li>\n<li>Generate a SCSI bus reset while media is being read from to and observe how long it takes the library to recover;<\/li>\n<li>Generate a SCSI bus reset while media is being written to and observe how long it takes the library to recover.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Knowing how long these operations take to complete fulfill two important (and overlapping) functions:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>You now have a timeframe for common activities to rely on when you&#8217;re otherwise stressed;<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;re less likely to panic and intervene because something seems to be taking too long, when in actual fact you just don&#8217;t normally note how long an operation takes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>This is pretty important \u2013 I&#8217;ve seen a lot of important recoveries go from say, stressful to full panic when excessive intervention is taken on a tape library and it isn&#8217;t given appropriate time to &#8220;recover&#8221; from errors or interrupts.<\/p>\n<p>Meeting brings understanding, understanding brings patience, patience brings success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For larger sites in particular, we frequently end up in situations where backup or system administrators are sufficiently remote from&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13,17],"tags":[534,983],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-thoughts","category-policies","tag-library-performance","tag-tape-operations"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-5y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7667,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/7667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}