It may not help you now, but you might consider putting measures in place
to help you in the future, to wit:
I keep only 14 days' worth of activity log in the database, but I run a
cron job at 00:15 nightly that extracts the previous day's activity log to
a flat text file, named with the date.
I've kept these files ever since I took over supporting our ADSM/TSM/ITSM
environment (1999). If the size gets out of hand on your server itself, you
can probably put a year or more's worth onto a single CD-R.
I've used these files to prove to a client when their data was or wasn't
backed up, reconstruct the sequence of parameter changes, and any number of
other ways. I'm sure you could see a history of mounts for a given tape,
including the device the tape mounted in each time.
I had a problem a while back with tapes "disappearing" when they went to
our offsite storage and never being requested to come back. When I started
running text searches against these activity log records for the individual
volsers, the pattern of the problem appeared quickly, and pinpointing the
root cause was almost trivial. (Also made the bosses happy when I mentioned
that I'd "found" 50+ missing tapes!)
The addition of admin command logging with version 4+ makes the information
even more valuable. When one of our operators reports an anomaly, and says,
"I think it happened last month, too", it ends all speculation when you can
go back and examine the exact commands they entered a month ago.
HTH
Regards, Steven
Steven J. Chaba
Lead Analyst, Distributed Systems Technical Support
Rochester Gas & Electric Corporation, Rochester, NY USA
+01 585.771.2137 voice
----- Message from David Stabler <dstabler AT MORRISONHOMES DOT COM> on Tue, 12
Nov 2002 09:02:57 -0500 -----
Subject: Tape
History....
Is there a nice easy way to tell where a tape has been?
I'm experiencing about a 15-20% failure rate, over time, in tapes in my
3584 LTO (Ultrium, not DLT). The tapes that are failing are from varied
vendors, but all are non-IBM tapes. I'm afraid that one of the drives
is potentially causing physical harm (tapes sent off for analysis have
shown, in some cases, damage after 150ft) but I don't want to have IBM
just replace everthing without having an idea of what I'm after.
What could I do to gather that information? I could run a nightly
script watching tape activity, of course, and keep that data, but I'm
wondering if Tivoli keeps that conveniently.
David Stabler, CATE/AIX, CNCE
Senior Systems Analyst
|
