On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 12:39:46PM -0700, Dale, Daniel P wrote:

Dan,

Thank you very much for your info.
We brought up the issue to Veritas and are waiting
for a response.


Thanks,
Andrew
> I have looked into this issue from within StorageTek's
> incident database. This problem was reported to us by Sun
> and some of our own customers. One of our Lab's was used to
> recreate the failure with a SCSI analyzer attached to the L700.
> In the lab, when a cleaning cartridge was mounted on a drive and
> a data cartridge mount was requested to the same drive the L700
> returned the correct 2h 30h 03 response. It is my belief that the
> status 5h 3Ah 00h you see in the Netbackup log, when the drive is 
> downed, is coming from an attempt of Netbackup to eject the cleaning
> cartridge after the L700 presents the Not Ready/Cleaning cartidge 
> installed status. Look at the text of the message. It is a move 
> medium error, of the cleaning cartridge, from the drive to the outport.
> 
> Veritas's position on this is that they do not support robot controlled
> drive cleaning. This is very clearly stated in a Tech Tip available on
> their support web page. Keyword 'TapeAlert'. This was also their response
> to StorageTek when we contacted them about this issue. I cannot say
> whether Veritas is working on supporting this in the future or not.
> 
> It is my suggestion that if TapeAlert is not working as you think it 
> should, that you open an incident with Veritas and with the Vendor who 
> supports your tape drive. Since both the hardware and software have to
> work together for TapeAlert to function and from what I've seen it is
> unclear why some drives get cleaned and not others. I know this places 
> a burden on you but it is the best way to get this problem addressed.
> 
> StorageTek recommends, if using frequency based cleaning, to set it to
> 100hrs for DLT7000's. With the caveat that this may not be right for
> everyone.
> 
> If you are using the Robot controlled cleaning on the L700 I recommend
> having
> your maintenance provider install 2.2 level code. There is a fix which 
> addresses drive cleaning reliability. I do not know if Sun has made this
> available for their branded L700's.
> 
> I have heard, as a work around, that some customers have (probably from an
> SSO
> environment) left Robot controlled cleaning enabled and created a script
> which
> parses the Netbackup log looking for the error text you described. The
> script
> then ups the downed drive. I'm not neccessarily endorsing this but I would
> like
> to know if anyone on this list has tried it and whether it worked or not.
> 
> Thanks,
> Dan Dale
> System Specialist
> StorageTek