Hello.
I am a technical support engineer working for a utility where they are using the Symantec Netbackup software with the Dell Powervault 124T tape drives. I haven't had much experience with the Netbackup software and there may be something very obvious that I've overlooked so please bear with me.
The utility has a redundant server setup with 2 independent tape drives attached to each server. About 2 weeks ago I started having problems with a certain type of policy for each server, but the error codes I keep getting point to a hardware problem. On the online server, the error code is 96 (unable to allocate new media for backup, storage unit has none available). This only happens for the Monthly (full backup). There are 2 other policies defined for the same server (a Weekly Full Backup and a Nightly Differential Backup). If it was a hardware issue, isn't it reasonable to expect the same problem to occur for at least the Weekly Full Backup as well, if not for all three. Looking at the Detailed Status window for the incomplete job, it gives the following error after trying each tape:
"Error bptm (pid = #####) error requesting media, TpErrno = Robot operation failed
Warning bptm (pid = #####) media id ####L3 load operation reported an error
current media ####L3 complete, requesting next media Any"
It repeats this for all tapes in the tape drive and then at the end reports:
"Error bpbrm (pid = #####) from client dts1: ERR - Cannot write to STDOUT. Errno = 104: Connection reset by peer
end writing
unable to allocate new media for backup, storage unit has none available (96)"
Initially, as mentioned before I thought this was a hardware problem maybe, but the tape drive is functioning properly, and additionally, other policies for the same server are working fine. I'm kind of stuck. My lack of knowledge regarding Symantec software functionality isn't helping, because I thought it maybe that some of the tapes are full (but I don't know how to check this).
-SSH1980