On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Davina Treiber wrote:

>Going back yet again to the old chestnut about tape drive cleaning...
>
>Does anyone know if it's possible to interrogate a tape drive (e.g. a DLT
>or an LTO) via SCSI commands, to find out whether it needs cleaning? I know
>that some jukeboxes can get this information from the drives, but I'm
>looking for a universal method - communicating directly between a server
>and a drive, irrespective of what the library is, or even if there is no
>library. Ideally I'm looking for a little standalone utility that will do
>this, for Solaris and/or NT.

This is an interesting question; very interesting.

I too would like to have such a script. My needs are more modest though. I
would be happy if the script only worked on the two tape libraries I work
with.

It seems to me that the only generic way to write such a script would be
to maintain a table of every known tape device and the number of hours its
manufacturer recommends between cleanings, then scan the /nsr/daemon.log
file for use of the available tape drives and use nsradmin to determine
which type of tape drive(s) are in use in a particular NetWorker
environment.

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