Thanks for the input.  Please see my responses below.

At 06:41 AM 1/25/01 -0800, you wrote:
>Curtis:
>
>A couple of thoughts
>
>1.  Why not have a pool of tapes dedicated to NBDB from
>the beginning?
>
>3. I'm not sure why you need to use bpsyncinfo to add
>the mediaid for the db backup if you are manually
>kicking off the bpbackupdb, unless you are doing it to
>ensure the db paths are consistent.  But you can get
>that using bpsyncinfo and then direct the bpbackupdb to
>use a pool other than NetBackup (bpsyncinfo -l and it
>is the 14th field and following if I'm not mistaken)

Because I thought that was the only way to do it until you forced me to 
look at the man page. ;)  So what you are saying is that I could do 
something like this:

pool_num=(Pool number for NDDB_Backups pool.)

vmchange -p $pool_num -m $VOLID

/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/tpreq -rv rvsn -a w -d dlt -p NDBD_Duplicates -f 
/var/tmp/somefile.txt

#Tpreq makes a file that's a symbolic link to the real drive, right?
#If not, what does the file look like?  What does it look like on NT?
device=`ls -l /var/tmp/somefile.txt|awk '{print $11}'`

/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpbackupdb -tpath $device -rv $VOLID -v

/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/tpunmount -f /tmp/somefile.txt -force

---------------
So would that change the volume's status to the same "0x01" status, like 
doing it the other way?

>2.  If you don't like that idea, then for your tape
>selection you may want to use the DBBACKUP_CALLED file
>to see which tape(s) have been used the last X times.
>Using the dbbackup_notify script will cat the
>DBBACKUP_CALLED file and included that in an email to
>someone_who_cares for tracking the last tape used.

Not sure what the benefit is of this one.

>4. You probably have a very good reason for doing this,
>but what I do to streamline my selection process of
>tapes in the robot is to use the -bx switch with
>vmquery then grep for TLD (if it is Tape Library DLT)
>for instance.  Functionally, it doesn't affect your
>script operation and what you are trying to accomplish
>(as you well know), but just an FYI.  I also use this
>extended listing to see if a tape is truly 'scratch' by
>testing the time assigned column, if it doesn't eq ---
>then I know that it is in use.

Uh, no.  I've just never heard of the -bx switch.  Can you send me what the 
output looks like?  (As I said, I'm not a client right now.)