Interesting.  I have had an IBM 3584 library with
(8) LTO1 drives, FC attached for over a year with
no problem.  Cleaning tape was installed initially
and autoclean turned on on the library.  Tape has not
been used yet!.  I backup nearly 700GB of data
a day and make offsite copies.  Don't do a lot
of restores. I started with 100 tapes in system
and now have 220.

I remember a thread some months ago - maybe a year
about cleaning.  Everybody then commented that 
their cleaning tapes weren't getting used either.

Anybody know what should be a "reasonable" use
of the cleaning tape?


David B. Longo
System Administrator
Health First, Inc.
3300 Fiske Blvd.
Rockledge, FL 32955-4305
PH      321.434.5536
Pager  321.634.8230
Fax:    321.434.5509
david.longo AT health-first DOT org

>>> DFosdike AT ELDERS.COM DOT AU 06/23/03 20:14 PM >>>
Greeting TSMers,

I have read this thread with great interest as we seem to have similar symptoms 
on the same kind of equipement.  IBM are confounded at present but are starting 
to come to the same conclusion as me that the autoclean  symptom on the library 
is not functioning as it should.  We originally put this down to TSM having 
control of the cleaning tapes but have now resolved this and cleaning is still 
not happening.  We use our drives (3 of them) 18-20 hours a day and the last 
cleaning was a manual one we did 3 months ago!   The IBM engineer said he 
surprised it still works at all.  We have thrown out 5 tapes (from a library of 
110) over the last 15 months which we now believe may not have been faulty at 
all, just victims of a dirty drive!  There is another thread related to the 
same errors (1117 etc) listed in this list back in February which leads me to 
the same conclusions.  If IBM come up with a solution I will post it here.

 David Fosdike
 Senior Technical Specialist
 Elders Limited
 08 8425 4565
 0417 714 467
 '...despise not the day of small things...'
 


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tomáš Hrouda Ing. [mailto:throuda AT HTD DOT CZ]
>Sent: Monday, 16 June 2003 9:44 PM
>To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>Subject: Interesting LTO fault's symptom
>
>
>Hi all,
>
>during last weeks I did interesting findings at one of production LTO
>3583-L18 library. There are 2 drives and both was changed past 
>series of
>media faults (one of them twice) past about 1 year of 
>operation. We have
>about 20 "historicaly touched" tapes with average 3-4 write 
>faults. Media
>faults are still repeated and my finding is all that faults 
>were done at
>70-75% of estimated capacity (set by longterm using to 105GB, 
>we use client
>compression) during filling the tape. It seems like all tapes 
>were corrupted
>nearly at the same place, of course there is some diffusion 
>because this is
>only estimated filling. Faults at these tapes are repeatedly occured at
>these percents of max capacity.
>
>I understand when one tape has media fault repeatedly at the 
>same place, but
>about 20 tapes? Could it mean that all tapes were corrupted by 
>one bad drive
>at the same place, or can be reason at microcode?
>
>We are in contact with our IBM support to solve it, but I am 
>interested if
>anybody of you register similar phenomenon?
>
>Tomas
>

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