Environment:
W2k master
w2k and NT4.0 media servers.
4 SSO 9840 STK drives, L700
Fiber channel connected.
Veritas 3.41_4

We recently had several tapes get mounted on the wrong drives
due to a problem on our end with the scsi to wwns translation on a
multiple media server environment using SSO. Several tapes may have had
the labels corrupted on them.

All of the tapes have expired and I have done a vmquery dessignbyid on them
in the volume database. They have also been moved to a separate pool to
prevent
netbackup from attempting to use them.
I would like to run a bplabel on each of these to make
sure the evsn and barcode matches. My problem is when we attempt to do the
bplabel.

We get the tape loaded in the drive and issue a
"bplabel -ev 130097 - d hcart -p 3 -n stk9840-1"
but we get back "Cannot assign a robotically controlled device".

I think I know the answer to my own question, but thought I might run it by
everyone first. Do I need to have a standalone drive in order to run bplabel
successfully against a tape?

Am I missing the boat here or is there an easier to all this? Currently I am
using robtest to move the tape from the silo to the drive and to bring to
drive
ready with a load. Next we are issuing the bplabel command above.
Suggestions on
easier ways to do this? I have about 20-30 tapes I would like to run a
bplabel,
but I really hate to remake the multihosted drive setup for SSO just to get
an unassigned
drive in the robot. Suggestions? BTW this is a 9840 STK drive so they are
not exactly hanging around our parts shelves for spares to work with.

Thanks,

Paul Bleimeyer