> Firstly the highly anticipated ARCHSYMLinkasfile=no function wasn't
> recognized,

Works for me!


ccnops:~ #ls -l /home/russells/src/rac/local/lib/racshellvars
lrwxrwxrwx   1 russells itss          19 Aug 26  1997 
/home/russells/src/rac/local/lib/racshellvars -> ../bin/racshellvars

ccnops:~ #dsmc archive ./src/rac/local/lib/racshellvars -ARCHSYMLinkasfile=no
ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager
Command Line Backup Client Interface - Version 3, Release 1, Level 0.7
(C) Copyright IBM Corporation, 1990, 1999, All Rights Reserved.
....
Symbolic Link-->              19 /home/russells/src/rac/local/lib/racshellvars 
[Sent]
Archive processing of './src/rac/local/lib/racshellvars' finished without 
failure.




> and the client refused to start without setting the
> DSM_DIR=/opt/IBMadsm-c
> DSM_CONFIG=/opt/IBMadsm-c/dsm.opt
> variables, even though I shouldn't have to.

That one sounds like you do not have the dsm.opt and dsm.sys files
installed into /usr/bin.  The ADSM client is looking for them there if
the environment variables are not set.

You could try:
        truss -t open dsmc qu files
 to see exactly what files the client program is trying to open.


Russell