In our case we were actually running TSM 5.1.6.4 (without Tapealert) on our
Production system.  We stumbled upon the tapealert message by hooking up a
test 5.2.2.4 system to our 3584 library to see if it had the "slow" problem
reading our tapes.  We were quite impressed to see the tape alert messages
showing us which of our tapes were bad.  So we just ran the checkins on our
tapes occasionally to see which tapes were bad.  By the time we upgraded to
5.2.2.4, we had no more corrupted tapes and were running the new firmware.

The only tape alert messages we saw in these cases were just in out test
during checkins.

We have a 3584 which supports Tape Alert - If you have a library that
supports Tape Alert you just turn it on in TSM with the Set command.  We
only saw the messages in the activity log.

Tim