All drives busy, how to free one for tape labeling?

Question

Our backups are currently wedged because of a media shortfall.
We have a dedicated mediafamily for full backups and all of the tapes for that pool have
been exhausted. All of the drives are have backups running (paused, really) and waiting
for tapes.
It should simply be a matter of labeling more tapes, but here is the problem:
catxcr allows you to examine the transcript and choose what to do. Selecting "help"
offers the choice to label a tape
1955.1: Error: couldn't perform auto-swap - can't find usable volume in library (OB device mgr)
1955.1: : help
1955.1: tape and library manipulation commands:
1955.1: labelvol [--force/-f] <vol_spec> <se_spec> -- label volume(s)but this yields
1955.1: : labelvol -b F26091 203
1955.1: Connection reset by peerAttempts to label a tape directly fail because they are reserved by OSB processes:
[root]# obtool labelvol -f -o -Xfamily:CR-MEDIA-DUP-ARCH4 -D obt8 -b A26001
Error: unable to open qlm connection - requested drive is in useas do attempts to cancel the job and either reserve or borrow the drive for a labeling operation:
[root]# obtool canceljob 1923; while obtool resdev obt8 | grep Error; do sleep 2; done
Info: cancelled job 1923.1.
Info: cancelled job 1923.
Error: drive obt8 is in use by:
OB component Host Process
obacslibd crbkpms1-sca 7630
obtar crbkpms1-sca 13626
observiced crbkpms1-sca 7509
[root]# obtool resdev obt8
Error: drive obt8 is in use by obacslibd on host crbkpms1-sca, process 20018.
[root]# obtool borrowdev obt8
Error: unable to borrow drive obt8 - drive cannot be borrowed.Taking the drive out of service doesn't help with any of the above.
Any suggestions how we can free up a tape drive long enough to label more tapes
into this mediafamily so backups can continue?
Restarting services is one possibility but this should be considered as a last resort.
Thanks,
-pc
Edited by: pcondran on Apr 22, 2011 4:04 PM
Edited by: pcondran on Apr 22, 2011 4:05 PM

Answer 1

If the other tapes are expired then they will be automatically relabelled for use with this media family, so you should never need to manually label tapes unless you're trying to expire tapes that still have valid backups on them.
The borrowdev commands are applicable to a single obtool session, so you have to just type "obtool" to get into that prompt and then do the borrowdev commands in that one session.
Thanks
Rich