Hi dan!

thnx for your advice.
So this happened meanwhile.
rolled an old 3575L16 from the trashcontainer to the server and hooked it up
(same cables and same drive)
booted it, run cfgmgr -v and voila! an smc0 and rmt0
so I think its the board.
to be sure I've checked the internal cabling, but this seemed to be just
fine.
I'm actually pretty depressed right now, we havent got a service contract
with IBM for this device (figures why i'm performing drive changes and
stuff) so this is gonna cost me a rib....well, my boss that is...

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Foster [mailto:dsf AT gblx DOT net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 8:48 PM
To: Michelle Wiedeman
Subject: Re: URGENT!! library def problem under AIX!


Hot Diggety! Michelle Wiedeman was rumored to have written:
> I allready tried all that. with 1 drive 3 drives (original) 5 drives etc.
> the drives are not the problem, the problem is the medium changer.
> (/dev/smc0)

We have a just-retired 3575 and used it with ADSM 3.1 for years.
Retired that combo two weeks ago for a 3584/TSM 5.1 to support a
major datacenter move.

One time, we lost smc0... turns out the media changer board had
fried itself so the CE came out and replaced it. From what I remember
about that particular board is that it's sensitive to being fried
or zapped by static electricity - most stuff in the 3575 is robust
but that particular board was not real good on the robust angle.

Another time we lost smc0; that one turned out to be an insufficiently
attached SCSI cables to that board after the CE had done some other
work in the 3575.

The third time we lost smc0 was because of a weird SCSI ID addressing
conflict due to CE having put a new drive in and having set the IDs
slightly differently even though none of the IDs clashed. Really odd
problem but went away after he set everything back to their previous
setting.

We later concluded that we'd have to sacrifice goats on a regular
basis to appease the smc0 deity just to keep things running ;)

I would recommend use of an anti-static strap and then making sure all
cables leading to the media changer board is secure.

Possibly try a library test of hardware from its built-in menu?

If it still doesn't come up, maybe call IBM to come and take a look?
(They were willing to support the 3575 under maintenance support contract,
even though the 3575 is ancient, no problems there. New boards and drives
were done on their own dime.)

Hopefully you'll share the eventual resolution to the list as it sounds
intriguing and I know there are still a bunch of us who have 3575 libs.

-Dan