On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Curtis Stewart wrote:

> Here's an interesting little piece of activity log from one of my remote
> TSM servers.... Gotta like TapeAlert.  Other than being an amusing way to
> start my day, everything checks out OK and I can't believe it.

[...lots of bogus TapeAlerts omitted...]

And then there were three.  :-)

So you're now the third person who has posted to this list in the past
month or so with this same problem.  At least this *looks* to be the same
problem - yours is with a 3583, the other instances I'm aware of are with
3584s.  Please see recent postings with the subject 'LTO2 corrupted index
question', where Jurjen Oskam and I discussed the 'flurry of silly
TapeAlerts' problems we've been seeing on our 3584 libraries.

In my case, I sometimes see a dozen of these TapeAlerts all at the same
time, telling me the tape just snapped, the drive needs cleaning, the
drive was just cleaned but the cleaning cartridge is no good, the data
cartridge is no good, the drive has a hardware fault, etc., etc.  None of
which appear to be true.  I get no error log entries or Atape dumps at the
time of these messages; I'm current on drive and library firmware and on
Atape.

These may be harmless, or they may not be; in either case, it makes it
harder to track and deal with "real" problems with the tape drives.  Last
I heard, both Jurjen and I have problems open with IBM hardware support
(personally, I suspect a firmware problem, but obviously that's just an
uneducated guess). Maybe if everyone who's seeing these messages contacts
IBM support, they'll have a better chance of figuring out what's going on.

Regards,
Bill

Bill Kelly
Auburn University OIT
334-844-9917