Strange Tape happenings in MVS land

Date:     August 13, 1997               Time: 10:31 AM
From:     Jerry Lawson
          The Hartford Insurance Group
(860)  547-2960          jlawson AT thehartford DOT com
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We have started to encounter a couple of odd tape handling problems.  Has
We have started to encounter a couple of odd tape handling problems.  Has
anyone else seen them?

1.  We seem to have a glitch where a storage pool tape is a candidate to be
scratched - it's status is  Empty, and it is marked as Read-Write.
Unfortunately, it doesn't get scratched.  Because this tape had been
previously associated with a client (the latest incident was with a client in
a collocated primary storage pool), a process such as migration will attempt
to use this as an output tape.  Unfortunately, when the open is issued to
MVS, UCC-1 get's invoked for the Write to a new empty tape, and because he
knows that the tape has been previously assigned to ADSM, he issues a 7XX
abend.  The reclaim process is eventually failed, with an ANR1401 mount
request denied message, then the migration is restarted after the appropriate
delay, only to ask for the same tape to be mounted, and ultimately to fail
again.  Last night ADSM  did this for about 12 hours bevore taking an SVC
dump and terminating.  On the subsequent restart, The two tapes were
recognized as being empty, and ADSM automatically deleted them.

     I am at a loss as to why the tapes did not scratch immediately.  I will
automate a response to the ANR1401 message, to make the tape unavailable.

2.  The second problem does not seem to be working correctly to me... I had a
tape in a Copypool that was marked as ReadOnly (on purpose - the tape was
physically OK, but was written on 18 track tapes prior to our conversion to
36 track.  Since we could no longer write to the tape (all 18 track drives
were gone), we marked it as readonly.  (our drives will read 18 track, but
not write in that format).  To recover the tape and clean up after the
conversion, I wanted to do a Move Data on the tape to copy it to another tape
in the copypool.  I did this, and was surprised to find that the tape was not
actually mounted, but instead data was copied from all of the primary pool
tapes.  This seemed to me to be wrong, since the tape has always been kept
here in the shop, and was not marked as being Offsite.  It would have been
easier, it seems to me, to just copy the data as would happen on a storage
pool tape.  It would appear that the assumption is that since the tape is a
copypool tape, it must be offsite, but that was not the case, and the status
of the tape did not show any offsite movement.  Anyone else agree?

TIA.


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                                                     Jerry
                                                     Jerry