Richard --

I seem to recall that one of the advantages of LTO was that the tapes
themselves were self-cleaning to an extent.

I have 4 cleaning tapes in the library; we've manually used one of them 11
times (more for checking out drive problems early on than for drive
cleaning). I've seen ONE tape in ONE drive throw a series of errors that
decoded as 'drive cleaning required'. By the time the tape dismounted, the
drive no longer needed cleaning. The same tape has worked fine in other
drives for the past three months and the drive hasn't thrown any errors
since.

I'm thinking that these drives work in a manner similar to the DLT drives I
used to have. If the signal strength from the heads degrades, the drive
needs cleaning -- but only if the signal is still low at label
check/dismount, because the normal tape movement may have cleaned things up.
And since the cleaning tapes are mildly abrasive, the idea is to not use
them if they aren't required.

I've decided to not worry about cleaning tape usage until I start seeing
tape I/O errors in my logs.

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO< Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Sims [mailto:rbs AT BU DOT EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 7:49 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Interesting LTO fault's symptom


>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.

Let's pursue some details to try to pin this down...

 - The cleaning tape is an LTO type, with a volser prefix of "CLNI" or
"CLNU"?
   (Otherwise the library thinks of it as a data cartridge.)
 - It was inserted using the procedure as documented in the 3584 manual?
 - It resides in a normal data cell (not the Diagnostic Tape cell)?
 - You have verified that Auto Clean is (still) activated?

If all of the above checks out, I would try following the manual's
procedures
for removing a cleaning cartridge, and then reintroduce it, watching
particularly for a "Moving cleaning cartridge" message followed by
"Insertion of Cleaning Cartridges has completed".  Then re-check Auto Clean
being active.

Manually perform a Clean Drive operation to assure that the library
understands
the cleaning cartridge and that the function occurs.

If still nadda, have your CE upgrade the library microcode, as appropriate;
and the drives microcode, as they may be failing to signal that they need
cleaning.

  Richard Sims, BU