Well. I am making some progress in getting these 3592 drives working, but
also having some strange issues.

First off, IBM "lied" about the minimum level of TSM server required for
3592 support. The readme for 5.3.2.1 says that 3592 gen 2 are supported
and while my server was at 5.3.2.2, it would not see the drives via SMITTY
- TSM devices - my other server at 5.3.2.3 worked just fine. I ended up
with a quick upgrade to 5.3.3 and the drives magically appeared.

Now I have a stranger problem. Two of the 4 drives are working. The other
two keep flaiming out and are now inaccessible (which is really strange
since I ran tapeutil against all 4 to get their serial numbers). Tapeutil
now fails with a timeout (err 78) when attempting to open them.

Both SAN switches (IBM 2109-F16) are at the same firmware level and as I
mentioned, earlier, both systems are at the most current Atape and atldd
levels that were available a month ago, sans the "engineering" versions.

We have not been able to find any info on the errors we are seeing (AIX
5.1 - yes, yes.....we know this is unsupported and plan to upgrade, RSN !)

Can anyone offer some suggestions on what is going on and how to
diagnose/fix it ?

LABEL:          TAPE_ERR4
IDENTIFIER:     5537AC5F

Date/Time:       Tue Aug  1 12:51:35 EDT
Sequence Number: 36824
Machine Id:      0009520A4C00
Node Id:         agena
Class:           H
Type:            PERM
Resource Name:   rmt15
Resource Class:  tape
Resource Type:   3592
Location:        10-78-01
VPD:
        Manufacturer................IBM
        Machine Type and Model......03592E05
        Serial Number...............000007857392
        Device Specific.(FW)........172E
        Loadable Microcode Level....A1700D5C