tape reporting header is 6 character but TSM thinks it is 8 chr

Monkeh

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PREDATAR Control23

I have come across a situation at a site where TSM believes all tapes have 8 character serials, but there are some tapes which appear to have been labeled as 6 character barcodes and data written to them. Now when we try to mount one of these tapes the library mounts the correct tape, but the volume header reports a different barcode than TSM expects to see so fails the mount.

tsm: LONTSMP11>q act begind=-1 sea=110401*

Date/Time Message
-------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------
11/25/2015 12:38:15 ANR8356E Incorrect volume 110401 was mounted instead of
volume 110401JB in library WDCLIB01. (SESSION: 1397471)
11/25/2015 12:39:12 ANR8381E 3592 volume 110401JB could not be mounted in
drive RMT267 (/dev/rmt267). (SESSION: 1397471)
11/25/2015 12:39:12 ANR9790W Request to mount volume 110401JB for library
client LONTSMP16 failed. (SESSION: 1397471)
11/25/2015 16:16:46 ANR2017I Administrator BU issued command: QUERY
ACTLOG begind=-1 sea=110401 (SESSION: 1399339)


tsm: LONTSMP11>q libv * 110401*

Library Name Volume Name Status Owner Last Use Home Device
Element Type
------------ ----------- ---------------- ---------- --------- ------- ------
WDCLIB01 110401JB Private LONTSMP16 Data 2,139 3592

In TSM all Libvolumes are listed as 8 character volsers, so I imagine someone has changed the device drivers or changed the medium changer to a different device and forgotten to set it to 8 character and then realized and corrected this but then did not notice that some tapes have been labeled as 6 character volsers and have been written to.

I am preying / guessing there is a way using a tool such as NTUTIL to change the volume header of a tape, but I cannot see a documented one. Unfortunately, they do not have copy pools on this TSM server so if we cannot mount these tapes they will loose access to a lot of backup data.
 
PREDATAR Control23

The internal label (or header) used by TSM is the first 10 bytes of the first 80 bytes block on the tape. That's written to the tape by TSM when labeling the tape. The only way to change that is to relabel the tape, which can only be done if the tape is scratch or if using overwrite=yes, which deletes the data.

So above was the long answer to say no you cannot change it.

Not sure if this would work, but worth a try:
-checkout libvolume WDCLIB01 110401JB checklabel=barcode remove=bulk
-checkin libvolume WDCLIB01 checklabel=yes search=bulk

Hopefully, it will checkin the tape relying on the internal label as opposed to the barcode. If this works, I'd do a move data to return it to scratch, and relabel it with 8 characters like the others.
 
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