Slight tangent, Wanda's volume location comment spurred this:
We upgraded our SCSI 3584 offsite lib to ALMS, no problems...but the onsite
ALMS install went horribly wrong...(maint windows are rare, we did several
things). Afterwards the lib couldn't reliably find a particular tape with both
(robot) hands. Some days it could find some vols, other days those had slid
out and it would forget others -- and not just a few, but 60 to 100 of them
(10-25% of the lib)!...NO extraordinary measures (like emptying frames and
re-inserting) resolved the problem. Our OEM maintenance could not find the
problem and shrugged and walked off after a couple of months, intimating it was
OUR problem and would not bring in IBM. A lot of time was spent looking
through all 3 frames for a particular volume that was needed; reclamation
couldn't find volumes either. We took outages, powered down the lib...lib and
server...the problem persisted. It was ugly, VERY ugly.
Oddly, no regular pub (TSM books, IBM hardware/operator manuals, device manuals
or stuff online) told you where the *hardware* stores the volume locations...I
stumbled on an obscure 4-5 page blurb from a tape plant engineer with that
magic sentence: the volume physical location information is stored in the
robot's node cards!! That was the key!
We resolved the problem by killing it dead....powered it down (nicely), pulled
the physical power, then pulled the (?9V?) battery from the robot to clear the
CMOS, waited awhile for all memory to die, and powered everything back up. Of
course it was a blithering idiot...all upgrades were lost. (We were delayed a
bit because of the upgrade keys -- the lib was shipped with the capacity
expansion feature but the plant didn't put a code sticker in the lib or on any
documents...after confirming a key was required, I finally found a nice guy in
Mexico who could still generate the code!).
Does ALMS change the node cards' function? I suspect not but don't know for
sure. For some reason I haven't screwed up the courage to reinstall ALMS, but
may do so -- we recently went back to IBM maintenance. :) - Susie
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The "virtual I/O slots" only get involved when you put cartridges in through
the 16/32 slot physical I/O door. For the initial library load, just open the
BIG doors and put the tapes directly into the slots yourself.
Then for a SCSI library, the syntax for CHECKIN is slightly different than for
your 3494.
checkin libv bubba search=yes status=scratch checklabel=barcode waitt=0
volrange=TS1000,TS1999
checkin libv bubba search=bulk status=scratch checklabel=barcode waitt=0
Search=YES tells TSM to checkin from the INSIDE library slots.
Search=bulk tells TSM to checkin what's in the I/O door (with ALMS, it's a
virtual I/O door, but TSM doesn't know that.)
FWIW:
For the 3494, TSM just tells the 3494 what it wants done, and doesn't know or
care where in the library tapes are located. All the inventory management is
done outboard by the 3494.
If TSM tells the 3494 to mount a cartridge, he doesn't need to know where the
cartridge is, that's handled by the 3494
For a SCSI library, including the TS3500 doing business as a 3584, TSM has to
figure out what tapes are in what slots at checkin time, and saves the slot
numbers in devconfig so he can send the appropriate commands for cartridge
movement. (e.g., take cartridge from slot 1024, load in drive position 6).
That's why the checkin commands are different.
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