Recently, when running my tape detail report, I noticed that one of my
tapes had appeared to have been expired.  The tape in question has
backups that are set to never expire, and I do not believe that anyone
manually expired the tape.  Running bpimmedia -ev 700291 showed the
images I expected on the tape, however bpmedialist produced no output at
all.

This was puzzling because the tape had recently been used for a restore
on the day I noticed this problem.  Further, I am still able to restore
from that tape.

Today, I restored some files from the tape, and afterward noticed that
the bpmedialist would now show the tape as belonging to the media server
that did the restore.  Unfortunately, the output showed

kbytes = 0, nimages = 999, vimages = 125
status = 0x402

It also shows the assign date as 0.

The value for vimages appears to be correct, however.  After the restore
I did today, it showed the expiration date for the tape to be tomorrow
(!).  I was able to use bpexpdate to set the expiration to infinity.  I
also saw that the status of the tape is SUSPENDED.  I tried using the
bpmedia command to unsuspend the tape, but it refused to unsuspend the
tape, even though it did not report an error.

What I really do not want to do is have to import this tape as it
contains over 900GB of data that would also have to be re-duplicated to
be sent off site.

Can I use vmquery -assignbyid to assign the tape?  If so, what format is
the assigndate expected to be in?

We're running NBU DC 3.4 with patch 4.

Thanks for any advice!

--
Jack Forester, Jr.
Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator
Lockheed Martin Information Technology