Back to the original question. You've got to fix that original Solaris
server somehow. You don't need to access the whole tape library, just
one LTO4 drive, and then mount tapes manually.

The tapes themselves are utterly useless without the original TSM
Database. There is no way to reconstruct the database from the tapes -
the metadata is not there, such as file names and owner nodenames. Files
that were encrypted at the client will be very difficult if not
impossible to recover without the databsae.

There is a machine called Index Engines that you can buy, which can read
TSM data from tapes. However, it still cannot recover the metadata, such
as whom it belongs to or what the filenames were, or whether it was the
most recent copy. File formats that contain binary metadata themselves,
such a Microsoft Word documents, will not come back in any useable form.
It is mostly used in forensic exploration such as legal e-discovery.
These machines are not cheap - repairing your broken Solaris machine
would likely cost less, take less time and effort, and give better
results.

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu
======I have not lost my mind -- it is backed up on tape somewhere.=====


On Wed, 11 Dec 2013, Nora wrote:

>Hello,
>We recently lost a TSM server because of a severe server hardware problem that 
>makes the tape library completely inaccessible to the server. We are now 
>building a new TSM server and connecting the library to it. However the new 
>TSM server we are building is on a different OS (Red Hat linux) while the 
>original server was on Solaris 10. The different OS's between the 2 servers 
>makes it impossible to restore the existing TSM database although we have it. 
>And the old server's inability to use the tape library is also stopping us 
>from using the "Export Node" functionality for data we want to save.
>We are mainly concerned about 120 GB of archived data that we want to retrieve 
>from this tape library with TSM before migrating to the new TSM server.
>Does anyone know of a way to read TSM data of LTO4 tapes without the catalog 
>so we can save this data? Or does IBM provide such a service ?
>
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