Beware.  I have a Sun L20 tape robot.  When I got it and wondered about
setting up the auto-tape-cleaning facility on Netbackup, I then wondered
how often DLT tape drives should be cleaned.  So I called Sun and got
their tape gurus.  Their response was "don't auto-clean your drives,
you will wear out your tape heads".  The party line from Sun is:
clean your drives when they need cleaning, ie when you see the "needs
cleaning" icon appear on the LCD of the tape robot.

Is this good advice?  I don't know.  Since installing my L20 last summer
and cleaning the drives once at the start, I have never seen the "needs
cleaning" icon appear on my LCS screen.  So I have never cleaned my
drives since.  I've had no problems or bad tapes either.  Maybe it was
good advice from Sun, or maybe I'm just lucky.  Any other opinions?

** Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D                         PHONE: 207-872-3659
** Senior UNIX Sysadmin, Information Technology    EMAIL: jaearick AT colby DOT 
edu
** Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill,               FAX: 207-872-3076
** Waterville ME, 04901-8842
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Wed, 15 May 2002, William Enestvedt wrote:

> Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 08:47:09 -0400
> From: William Enestvedt <Will.Enestvedt AT jwu DOT edu>
> To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] TapeAlert cleaning, TLD, and Pools
>
> If I want my DLT robots to clean themselves automatically -- instead of
> downing the drive and mewling until I return in the morning -- do the
> cleaning tapes need to be in a specific Pool? My environment is: NBU
> DataCenter 3.4; Solaris 2.6 on servers & clients; a Master Server w/Sun L9
> (a Quantum DLT8000 drive with 9 tapes), and a Media Server w/Sun L9.
>    Thanks in adnvance for any suggestions.
> -wde
> --
> Will Enestvedt
> UNIX System Administrator
> Johnson & Wales University -- Providence, RI
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>