Client backups hanging with "writing to drive" status. (4043239)

Solution Details
Date:10/17/05
Effected NV Version: 7.x
OS Version: N/A
Plugin version: N/A
Application version: N/A

Description:
Drives show state of writing within Device Manager but there is no measurable activity within the job progress monitors. Some jobs hang. They don't fail and don't show anything in the logs (other than that they're started), and show up in the Job Manager as 'Running', Device Manager shows that the job has the drive locked & that drive is writing, although if you check the job monitor no data is being transferred.

Step [1]- Check the activity of the drives using nvpview & looking at the trace buffer for the relevant device manager processes. The trace buffer showed that both the drives had entered a write state
netvault reduces the device manager tracing to bare minimum space left estimates when a drive begins to write as this would slow down the whole backup process. Having taken this into account the trace showed that the drives were doing nothing within the write state as no additional trace entries were being seen within the buffer. Another test was to set the trace to file within pview & see if the file grew at all it did not indicating that nothing was going on.

Step [2] - Determine what jobs were locking the drives.
enter the device manager
select the relevant drive
select the status option
select the batch status tab from the resultant display
this displayed the job id that was assigned the drive

Step [3] - Check the status of the jobs locking the drives -
the jobs were running waiting for media.

Step [4] - Determine what media each job was waiting on
by performing a diagnose on the relevant media requests within the device manager.
it was VL01-113 for both jobs which was locked being written to by a 3rd job.

Step [5] - Establish which job was locking the media -
entered media manager
selecte

[1] start the netvault configurator
[2] select job manager tab
[3] set - timeout - keep alive rate = 5 min.
[4] hit the apply button on the configurator
[5] select network manager tab
[6] double the current values for :
time to complete a remote connection (default is 30)
time wait before dropping inactive connection (default is 300)
[7] hit the apply button on the configurator
[8] stop + restart the netvault server