In regard to: [Networker] Tape Alert message, Michael Leone said (at 8:29am...:

One of my servers recently had a log entry that reads "TapeAlert  flag
"Lost statistics" has been posted for \\.\Tape0".  And my searches aren't
coming up with anything useful as to what this means.

I've never seen this particular message before, but my suspicions
completely match Carsten's -- the drive lost the ability to report
statistics or the statistics were reset.  Neither is a normal situation
and probably bears further investigation.

Tape drives and many other modern devices that speak the SCSI protocol
keep a lot of internal statistics.  These can be read via various SCSI
commands.  Examples of things that our LTO drives track:

- lifetime load count
- current temperature
- lifetime hours powered on
- amount of tape that has passed the tape head
- how many times it has been powered cycled
- compression ratio for the last N tapes

There are other items, these are just a sample.

It's these type of statistics that I would assume have been "lost", where
"lost" might just mean that they're not currently being reported.  You
may wish to power-cycle things and see if they come back or if they're
reset.

Either way, you probably want to keep an eye on that particular drive.
This could very well be a precursor to failure.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney AT ndsu DOT 
edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
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