Cta-tape-label "feature"

General Discussion
1

Hi all,

I’ve been playing with cta-tape-label and have found that if the TPCONFIG file has more than one tape drive defined cta-tape-label aborts. I realise that at CERN you run one drive/server, but at RAL we tend to have 2 or more drives per server. We can work round it by commenting out all but one drive and restarting the tape daemon; doing the label; undo the edit and restart tape daemon. Not hard, but just irritating. Any chance of putting the equivalent of the castor “-u” option so a drive can be specified on the command line?

Are there any other places in CTA that the code assumes each tape server only has one drive attached?

Thanks

Tim

[root@getafix-ts9 cta]# cat TPCONFIG

Example of a tape configuration file (/etc/castor/TPCONFIG)

UNITNAME DGN /dev/XXXX smcDRIVE_ORDINAL

LTO8_16 obelix_lto /dev/lto_1 smc16

LTO8_15 obelix_lto /dev/lto_3 smc15

[root@getafix-ts9 cta]# cta-tape-label -v IR0301

Aborting: Failed to read configuration: 2 drives configured

2

Hi Tim,

I’ve created an issue for this. We’ll try to make sure this is in place before RAL migrates to CTA.

Cheers

Michael

3

Thanks Michael (why do I have to type 20 characters?)

Tim

4

At IHEP, we also have the same problem with cta-tape-label, while we don’t need to restart cta-taped after commenting and uncommenting extra drives in /etc/cta/TPCONFIG when labeling a tape. We are still learning CTA, and not sure if this would lead to more problems.

But it’s truly needed to have an option to specify the labeling drive without commnenting and uncommenting /etc/cta/TPCONFIG.