>The thing is that i'm not interested in the Storage pool volumes or
volumes
>in the library,...
>I want to know ALL volumes.
>Also the DB backups, the scratch tapes in the desk of the Media team, ...
>Basicly every tape that has ever been labeled on that server.

>How else do you know what label to give to a new tape ?
>I know I've labeled tape ec0001 through eC0100, but if a colleague wants
to
>label ten more, how does he know they have to be ec0101 to ec0110 if q
>vol,.. shows the highest volume in use, or the library to be ec0071 ?

Stan,

Unfortunately, you've uncovered one the, ummmm, "clumsy" parts of TSM.  The
way TSM manages scratch tapes, that is, tapes that are now empty and ready
to be re-used, is to not manage them at all!  What TSM does when a tape
becoms empty and is brought back onsite, is delete it from the volumes
table.  It will not be known to TSM again until it is checked into a
library as a scratch, and then it will be in the libvolumes table.
However, the volhistory table (do a "q volhist", the output may be large)
does keep a record of when the tape was used and deleted.  If the tape has
been re-used five times, there should be ten records in volhistory -- a
"STGNEW" and a "STGDELETE" for each use.  This table is also where TSM DB
backups and backupsets are managed (they do not belong to any storage pool,
and are not in the volumes table).

You also said you need to track the tapes in the drawer of your media
group... TSM cannot do that, you'll have to do it manually.  Those tapes
are the ones that were deleted when they came back from the vault, and will
not be seen again until they get checked in.  Ideally, in TSM, you should
check ALL tapes back into the library as soon as possible (maybe keep a
couple on hand in case you need to do a quick backup and have no
scratches).  This presumes of course that your library is large enough to
hold all of your tapes (ours isn't, so we're in process of upgrading to a
larger library).

As for knowing what label to allocate next, you'll have to manually track
that also.  As Matt said, I think most of us use pre-printed barcode
labels, and that is basically the "volser number tracking system".

Sorry I can't give any better advice... we've been down the same road,
trying to locate missing tapes.  They are a fact of life, I guess.  That's
what originally prompted me to write the qtapet Perl script.

Robin Sharpe
Berlex Laboratories