On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Greg Tevis wrote:

> Our ADSM servers do support the exabyte 480 8mm library...

Yes and no. We encountered a couple of problems trying to get the
jukebox to work

1) We had barcode labels with 8 digits. ADSM read those on startup,
and gives something like

05/23/96   08:21:42      ANR9754I Barcode of element 18, '00000017
                                    ', exceeds 6 characters in length.

I made a call on the hotline and they told me that the product is
functioning as designed. To my suggestions that the software
simply could ignore the leading extra left characters, as another software
does we are currently looking at, I got the responce that this is a design
change. IBM also that it may be inconvenient and that it will be
considered for future changes.=20

So get the rigth bar code labels. Otherwise it will be difficult to run
this jukebox.

2) We had problems with the F/W SCSI adapter. After two or
three
weeks of operations over 50% of the tapes were in the state of read-only
or unavailable. So make sure if you have those adapters, that the have the
right ROS level > 74.

3) The support of cleaning is not existing in ADSM. When I made a call
that we would need such a feature, the hotline told me that the
corresponding IBM product does an automatic clean, as needed. One can
argue what is better, hardware controlled cleaning or software controlled,
but fact is that you have to do a manual cleaning. On the front panel LCD
display you have to switch the Interface to from SCSI to LCD control. Then
perform the cleaning and afterwards which this back to SCSI control. If
this will be forgotten, no backups will take place. The drives need at
least every week a clean.

>=20
> ..greg tevis
> (if the drive is scsi, why doesn't someone clean it??)

Hope that helps=20

   Andreas Fl=F6ter=20

______________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: These are my views and not those of my employer.

=09=09=09Andreas Floeter
Phone: +49 40 74 37 - 48 50=09FAX: +49 40 74 37 - 27 55 (or 47 60)
email: Andreas.Floeter AT airbus DOT de

=09=09Daimler-Benz Aerospace Airbus GmbH
Kreetslag 10, 21129 Hamburg; Postfach 95 01 09, 21111 Hamburg, Germany