[Veritas-bu] "Expiration" date?

Greetings!

I ran a "bpmedialist -summary", just learning some of the commands so
that I can start writing some admin scripts, and it gave me a nice
stdout printout:

************************************************************************
*
MEDIA SUMMARY FOR SERVER crook ON Wed Jun 09 2004 12:06:47
************************************************************************
*

ACTIVE   FULL  SUSPENDED  FROZEN  IMPORTED
   79    176        0       17        5

Number of NON-ACTIVE media that:
       6 - are non-active and not written yet
            NTF002 (FROZEN)
            LOG023 (FROZEN)
            NTF056 (FROZEN)
            000554 (FROZEN)

<...etc...>

and then there was the section:


Number of ACTIVE media that, as of now:
       3 - will expire within 1 week
            NTF019 expires 06/10/2004 18:34
            EXC087 expires 06/11/2004 21:16
            EXC083 expires 06/12/2004 19:04
      22 - will expire between 1 and 2 weeks
            NTF017 expires 06/16/2004 18:09
            NTF049 expires 06/17/2004 16:04
            NTF051 expires 06/17/2004 17:04
            NTF001 expires 06/17/2004 22:42
            NTF014 expires 06/17/2004 17:04
            EXC012 expires 06/19/2004 19:05
            GEN018 expires 06/23/2004 09:27
            GEN001 expires 06/20/2004 18:04

<...blah...blah...>

In a robot that holds 180 tapes, almost 100 of them are inactive!!!!

Anyways, does the "expires" flag mean the *image* expires, or the actual
*tape* expires? If it's the tape, we're going to lose over 2/3rds of our
remaining active tapes within a month!!! Yikes!!!!!! At $40 a piece,
it's going to be fun when I tell my boss that we need to order about $5k
in new tapes or we'll have a virtually empty robot in less that a month!
And does this mean the images on the "expired" tapes are going to be
purged from the catalog (will we lose our archives)?

(NOTE: I am coming into this after having someone else who worked here,
i.e., it wasn't me)

I know that it's possible to go and reset the expiration date on tapes
to whatever you want, including "never", but I do think that all tapes
should be expired eventually to maintain data integrity. But one guy
here says he just put a new tape in the bot a week ago and it's set to
expire in three weeks! That just seems wrong, I don't think he's had
this tape sitting on the shelf for three years.

Any clues?

Info:
NBU 4.5_FP6 on Solaris
IBM Ultrium LTO drives & tapes

Thanks!!

....k
-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-
Kevin Freels                         kfreels AT askjeeves DOT com
Senior UNIX SysAdmin                          510.985.7444
Ask Jeeves                                         ask.com
"We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well and live."