Hi everyone,

We ran into a strange problem after upgrading to TSM4.1 on OS/390.
We tried to run a restore of a client file - it failed giving the following
error:
ANS4035W File '/stage/backups/TRANSACTION_SYSTEM_DAILY.11OCT1999.txt.Z'
currently unavailable on server.

When looking at the server side to get more detail on what actually caused
the error(maybe a tape marked as unavailable), we saw the following
disturbing message in the server activity log:

06/05/2001 11:05:54  ANR0548W Retrieve or restore failed for session 4774
for node SCREAMER (AIX) processing filespace /stage for file
/backups/ TRANSACTION_SYSTEM_DAILY.11OCT1999.txt.Z stored
as Backup - data integrity error detected.
ANE4035W (Session: 4774, Node: SCREAMER)  Error processing
 '/stage/backups/TRANSACTION_SYSTEM_DAILY.11OCT1999.txt.Z-
 ': file currently unavailable on server.

We could not find any info in terms of exactly where the problem was so we
assumed it was the new level of TSM(4.1) that we upgraded to that caused the
problem. We then restored the original TSM database to a second server
running the original 3.7.4 code and retried the restore.
This time we received the same message from the client but only after a
specific volume was mounted on the server and the normal OS/390 messages
appeared indicating I/O errors on the tape. We then listed the volume and
saw that Tsm recorded 4 previous read errors on this specific tape.

Now - the TSM4.1 server does not even mount the tape - it immediately comes
back saying the data is unavailable - no indication of where the data is
located. The better part of all this is according to the explanation of the
server side message  - ANR0548W - we have a database integrity problem and
the only way to solve it was to restore from a copypool tape or if that was
not available run the notorious auditdb command.

Why has this changed i nthe new version - the message is useless and
actually misleading.
Just keep the above in mind - those that are already on 4.1

Cheers
Christo Heuer
ABSA Bank