I have a guess. I have a 3494, so I might be wrong, but I will
take a shot.

        When you configure the tape library to have 2 tape grippers, you
lose access to the top 2 and bottom 2 tape slots in every column. This
is done so that if one of the grippers fails, the accessor can still get
to every tape.

        My guess is that when the library was rebooted, it came up
thinking that it had dual gippers and removed access to those slots. Do
you have dual grippers?

        Check the configuration of the library to see if it changed.

My guess,
Ben
 

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Jurjen Oskam
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 12:19 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: 3584 library: problems with some trays

Hi there,

Some time ago we experienced a power failure that lasted long enough to
make us shut down our 3584 library. This was done gracefully, and when
the power came back we turned the library back on. The TSM server was
also gracefully shut down and turned back on.

After TSM came back, I did an AUDIT LIBRARY which exited with a failure;
two tapes which TSM thought were in the library, weren't (according to
the library) so TSM took them out of its inventory. The strange thing
was that the tapes were indeed in the library.

Some investigation revealed that the library was somehow "blind" to
tapes in the last row of the first and second column, but this only
happened after a library initialization due to a powerup or open/close
of the entire front door.

This happens with every tape I tried, so the labels aren't the problem.
A tape which is perfectly well recognized in any slot doesn't show up in
the lowest slot in column 1 and 2. The library doesn't detect anything
there, it'll also let you move a tape to a full slot using the control
panel. Of course, this results in an error (94 80: slot unexpectedly
full).

IBM is already on this, and it's no big problem because I can easily
work around it by leaving the first row almost completely empty. This
results in the problematic slot not to be used, because our tape
rotation isn't that high.

I was interested if this symptom perhaps looks familiar to someone here.
We're on library code 5770, and the TSM symptoms are errors about slots
being unexpectedly full and TapeAlerts about the library inventory being
inconsistent.

Thanks,
--
Jurjen Oskam