Craig,

I agree very much with Paul's responses to questions from Craig about
the device class and mountlimit proposed changes:

I only ever change the mountlimit when deleting or adding drives to
perform some maintenance operation on a drive and then to put it
back into service.

What you propose to do would presumably help also in the situation
when a drive goes "down" when there is no-one in attendance to delete
the drive and adjust the mountlimit?

I too have in the past failed to keep the two in step and so welcome
these changes.

Like Paul, I wish there was a way to say temporarily make this drive
unavailable, and further, say "please (adsm) make this drive unavailable
the next time it is idle" - i.e. allow a bit of forward planning.

We too will be looking at running multiple servers sharing the 3494
and 3590 drives so any improvements which will allow us to flexibly
and conveniently share the drives between multiple servers will be
very welcome indeed.

Likewise, thanks a lot for the opportunity to comment in advance.

Regards, Sheelagh


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Sheelagh Treweek                         Email: sheelagh.treweek AT oucs.ox.ac 
DOT uk
Sheelagh Treweek                         Email: sheelagh.treweek AT oucs.ox.ac 
DOT uk
Oxford University Computing Services     Tel:   +44 (0)1865 273205
13 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN, UK     Fax:   +44 (0)1865 273275
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On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:37:23, Paul Zarnowski <psz1 AT cornell DOT edu> wrote:
On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:37:23, Paul Zarnowski <psz1 AT cornell DOT edu> wrote:

>Craig,

>First of all, I would like to thank you very much for asking the user
>community about this before making the change.  This type of advance
>communication is very much appreciated!  To answer your questions:

>- I have never needed to set the mountlimit for a device class to anything
>  other than the number of drives currently available in that class.  Indeed,
>  I always found it a nuisance to have to both delete a drive and also
>  decrement the mount limit for the device class.

>- While you are working in this area, I have often wished for the ability
>  to temporarily quiesce, or vary offline, one of the drives in a library,
>  so that I could clean the drive, or perform some other activity on it.
>  As things work now, I must DELETE the drive, decrement the mount limit,
>  clean the drive, then re-DEFINE the drive, and increment the mount limit.
>  This process is error-prone, especially when I forget to write down what
>  the definition of the drive should be (e.g., especially the element number).

>- We will be looking into using NetTape to share drives between ADSM and
>  other servers.  We don't know much about it yet, but I wonder if there
>  might be some reason to have a lower mount limit in such an environment???
>  I have to confess that I don't yet understand fully how ADSM works with
>  NetTape.  (we're planning to do this on an SP2)   I don't understand how
>  drives are allocated to ADSM when using NetTape.

<  ... some info cut here ... >