Up front, I'm not sure if this will work with Linux -- I run TSM on AIX. I'm 
also running a 3584. And not having much in the way of issues with LTO2.

I vary the path to the drive offline, then mark the drive offline.

IBM swaps the drive.

I set the drive online, then the path online.

And TSM is happy.

With a previous version of Atape, AIX, and 3584 Microcode I had to delete the 
drive from AIX and re-discover it before marking it online.

I'm curious about what issues you're having. We just upgraded from a 3584 with 
16 LTO2 to a 3584 with 10 LTO4 and 6 of our old LTO2. We put about 2.4 TB of 
data on tape daily, and copy about 1.8 TB to go offsite. In the 40 months we 
had the 16-drive box we had roughly six or eight instances of a tape not 
dismounting that lead to drive replacement.

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc



-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Zoltan Forray/AC/VCU
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 9:20 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Proper way to handle LTO2 drive replacement

I seem to always have issues when replacing LTO2 drives (3583-L72 library)
that fail and would like to know what folks do out there, to handle it
better than we do.

I currently have two dead/failing LTO2 drives.

When I pull one out and replace it with a spare, TSM wont use it and TSM
complains about the serial # and not being able to find the correct drive.

4/19/2008 9:01:58 AM ANR8963E Unable to find path to match the serial
number defined for drive LTO-DRIVE5 in library IBM3583-2 .

In the past, I have had to shut down all TSM servers and bounce the
lin_taped/IBMtaped process and/or bounce the server to rediscover the SAN
attached devices and reassign the new serial numbered drive and remove the
old one.   If there is a SAN path order shuffle and any drive gets a new
/dev/IBMtapenn, I have to reconfigure the paths for every drive effected
by the "musical chairs" reorg.

Your suggestions on how to better handle this (besides just chucking these
!@#$%^&*() LTO2 drives, which I hope to do within the next 1-2 years)!

All servers are Linux  RH4. The library owning servers are 5.5 lin_tape
drivers at at the latest level for the kernel (2.6.9.55 kernel - 1.10
driver)
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