Practical Knowledge of BRMS & TSM needed please.

[Markfv]

Long story severely shortened. I’m trying to be brief but it’s a twisted tale…

My company has an iSeries running four partitions which uses BRMS to backup to a pSeries running TSM.

Everything was working fine for several months with each partition backing up to the TSM using a node on the TSM named the same as the partition. Daily backups were set to expire after 31 days. Tapes on the pSeries were being used and expiring at the appropriate time and were being reused by the TSM.

Due to a networking issue, the IP address of the pSeries was changed by our network mananger (he forgot to mention it to us) and our backups failed for several days before we figured it out.

I tried to re-direct our iSeries to the new IP address but this wasn’t successful.

A call to IBM got the backups working again but to do it we had to create new devices and server information on the iSeries with the new IP address of the pSeries. They couldn't get it to work any other way.


In fixing the backup issue, all of the backups from all partitions were going to a single node on the pSeries rather than to the node named for the partition. After several weeks the nodes were renamed and backups were completing normally.

Problem:

We can’t access the old backups done under the old device/server names. BRMS gives us errors.

Tapes won’t expire. BRMS gives us errors.

IBM said we couldn’t access the old backups but they could help me remove some records from QUSRBRM/QA1AHS but to make the tapes expire, a TSM guru would have to help us through manually expiring them.

Help.

What I am looking for is who has practical experience in this to tell me IBM is correct or full of it. According to the IBMer I was talking to if we had a total system meltdown, we would be unable to access ANY of the backups. This is NOT the definition of a backup that I was expecting.

Can someone give me some direction as to how to access the old data (not needed – yet) and how to expire the tapes on the TSM side? Our TSM person is fine on the day-to-day stuff but doesn’t know the nuts and bolts behind the scenes sneaky stuff.

I have tested as recently as yesterday that a library (on each partition) can be backed up and restored successfully, so as far as I can tell, everything is currently working.

Thanks.

Mark Vonderschmitt

 

[moon-buddy]

Expiring or deleting the filespace? I would say the latter.

Ask your TSM admin to see "help delete filespace".

Edit: Well this would not work as is. This should be done via the BRMS add-on. It has been a while since I touched an AS400 node.

Let me see if I still have the old notes.

 

[Markfv]

My TSM admin tells me she can't see any details, just a big files space. She says that the iSeries is controlling all of that and she can't see any more information than here is a node and it has XXX gig of space allocated to it.

My opinion is she doesn't know how to look at it in the right way, but since I don't know how either, I can't prove it or offer any helpful suggestions.

She is using a gui to look, are there any command line commands which would show more detailed backup information?

Thanks.

 

[hogmaster]

We need to se output from :
Q NODE name_of_brms_node F=D (remove sensitive information before posting)
and
Q FILES name_of_brms_node F=D
This will help in figuring out what data you can ask the TSM admin to delete

 

[Markfv]

Here you go...

I had my TSM person do the commands as requested and "sanitized' the output.

It was too long for a post so I attached it.View attachment ADSM Info POST.txt

 

[hogmaster]

Thank you.
Do you want to delete all the data prior to 09/07/10?
if so then you can use the undocumented delete object command described elsewhere on this site ( http://adsm.org/forum/showthread.ph...o-delete-full-backups&highlight=delete+object ).
I suggest that you contact IBM prior to doing this just to make sure that this method can safely be used in you environment.

Anyhow enouggh with the boring stuff
Select object_id, filespace_name, hl_name,ll_name from archives where node=PROD and date<2010-09-07
if you do not get any data wit this sql query chnage "archives" to "backups" or possibly change the date
This will return a lot of information, use the fisrt column to as input to the command delete object 0 object_id