All,

I'm seeing what looks like excessive drive cleaning on our 3590 tape
drives.  We have 4 in a 3494 attached to an RS/6000 running AIX.
Comparing the ADSM activity log w/ the AIX error log, it looks like
the drive is being cleaned sometimes as frequently as every other tape
mount.  The 3494 is set to clean the drives after every 100 tape
mounts.  Given that "cleaning required" errors are appearing in the
error log:

  E507DCF9   0602025199 I H rmt0           TAPE DRIVE NEEDS CLEANING

I assume the problem is that the drive prematurely thinks it needs
cleaning, and that it's not the library force-feeding it cleaner
tapes.

Is anyone else seeing this?  Is it a problem w/ the drive firmware
perhaps?  (The firmware in our drives is level 95FB (according to
'lscfg -v'), although I notice now that one of them is at level 957D.)
Or perhaps we have a bad batch of tapes?  (The tapes are only about a
year only, and most have only been mounted a half dozen times.)

John