"tldtest" is a cousin to "robtest" but you can feed commands in via STDIN,
ie: 

echo "s d" | tldtest -r /dev/whatever

..to get the status of the drives.  

You can move tapes around, too.  This would be the core of the
rearrange-the-tapes-in-the-slots script, ie: 

echo "m s<src> s<dst>" | tldtest -r /dev/<blah>

-M

-----Original Message-----
From: David Rock [mailto:dave-bu AT graniteweb DOT com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 12:40 PM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Utilities to operate the Tape library?


* Daniel Denes <Daniel.Denes AT bg-sys DOT de> [2003-10-28 18:16]:
> Hello List,
> 
> we are using netbackup 3.1.1 on a Sun E450 with Solaris 2.5.1,
> operating a Sun TL 4/1800.
> 
> In the course of a disaster recovery test we figured out that two of
> our drives are writing faulty data (without giving out any error
> messages though!). We got them replaced and all should work fine now,
> so i have time to reflect the stuff we used to analyze the problem and
> i noticed that we have no idea as to how to control where a specific
> tape is being mounted; i.e. i can use tpreq to get the tape i want,
> but how to control in which of the drives 0-3 it is going to be
> loaded? The only way i could think of was by "DOWN"'ing the other
> drives but maybe (or rather, most likely) one of you guys knows a more
> elegant way.

If you are going for a quick fix, downing the drives would work just
fine. Nothing wrong with that. If you are looking for a more interactive
way to do things, you can use robtest to manually move tapes around.

> It is probably a very similar problem to move tapes within the
> library. As we change tapes once a week and usualyl there are like
> 25-30 tapes to be changed, we cannot use the slow load port; we rather
> open the front door and pick out the tapes that are full by hand. This
> is rather inconvenient if the tapes are located in the more backward
> areas of the library so i was wondering if ther is a commandline
> utility that will allow me to relocate the tapes within the library,
> possibly using the load port as stack or so.

Again, robtest is probably the simplest way to manually move tapes
around in the library.

> Sorry if this question is overly easy or off topic, i would appreciate
> any pointers towards where to find the information.

These types of questions are easy only if you already know the answers
;-)


-- 
David Rock
david AT graniteweb DOT com