I was basically a Legato guy until last week 
when I setup NetBackup 3.2 on Solaris 7/E250 (one
and only master server) and ATL P1000 (storage unit).

I did get a good full dump of my clients which
are all Solaris, but I need help with configuration
issues:

1. How do I set retention level for tape? Do I have
to set that? From what I understand, NB puts all 
backups with same retention level (as defined in 
the schedules) in the same tape, and the tape will
inherit the retention level of the backup itself.

That means if I set the retention level of one 
of my schedules to 9 (infinity), and if backups 
from this schedule to to tape DLT001, then 
DLT001 should never be recycled right? i.e should NOT
have an expiry date right?

I have a schedule Weekly_Full whose retention level
is set to 9. It ran sunday and used up 
4 tapes. But today when I do vmquery on one of the tapes it used, 
I see this:

================================================================================
media ID:              DBD001
media type:            DLT cartridge tape (11)
barcode:               DBD001
description:           Added by Media Manager
volume pool:           MIS-SERVERS (2)
robot type:            TLD - Tape Library DLT (8)
robot number:          1
robot slot:            1
robot host:            cheetah
volume group:          MIS-SERVERS
created:               Thu Sep 28 19:06:51 2000
assigned:              Thu Sep 28 20:07:19 2000
last mounted:          Sun Oct 01 11:42:42 2000
first mount:           Thu Sep 28 20:10:08 2000
expiration date:       ---
number of mounts:      10
max mounts allowed:    ---
status:                0x0
================================================================================


DBD001 was used on thursday when I ran a diff-incr schedule
whose RL is set to 1 (1 week). Why was the tape reused?
Why is the expiry date ---? Should'nt it be a week after
it was used for diff-incr?

The expiration date is --- for ALL my tapes. I ran 
a diff-incr last thursday and friday, and cum-incr 
last saturday. 


Questions:

1. What am I missing here?

2. HOW DO I KNOW WHEN A TAPE IS FULL? Legato shows this in 
   nwadmin as well as mminfo. What I want is to see what 
   tapes are full and what tapes are available for write 
   in say xvmadm or vmquery or vmadm....... or is there a 
    goodie for that?

3. What do you guys normally use for Media IDs? My thinking
   is if I use custom Media IDs (labelling tape) thats more
   work and error prone than use just the Bar Code for 
   Media ID. (I mean use Robot Update for new tapes). Again
   I am new to this stuff and need expert advise.


Notes:

I do not have ALLOW_MULTIPLE_RETENTION for tapes in bp.conf
I am using MPX. 4 concurrent streams per drive for storage
unit and 4 concurrent streams per drive for my schedules. 
and at any point I see max 16 streams running simultaneously..

Thanks in advance!

Chandra