I want to thank everyone who emailed me with suggestions.  I was able to 
hack together a script to suspend all of our active tapes.

Kendall, Scott APX wrote:
> 
> " I know I can use vmquery to find out if a tape is assigned, but how, then,
> do you determine which media server owns the tape so I can give bpexpdate
> all the information it needs to suspend the tape?"
> 
> bpmedialist will give you this.  If you don't sepcify the media server to
> run it against with -h, it will run down the list against each media server
> with a configured Storare Unit, which will eventually hit the one that owns
> it and report information on it.
> 
> 
> - Scott
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jack Forester, Jr. [mailto:jack.l.forester AT lmco DOT com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 8:09 AM
> To: veritas-bu
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Listing tapes in a media server's media catalog
> 
> We are going to be replacing our 9940A tape drives with 9940B tape 
> drives, and I will want to suspend all of the tapes that are currently 
> assigned to the media servers.  This is to prevent NBU from attempting 
> to use a tape written by the older drives in the new drives when doing a 
> backup.  The "B" drives can read tapes written by the "A" drives but 
> cannot append to them (as would be the case when doing a backup on a 
> partially used tape).
> 
> My experience shows that if a partially used "A" tape is used in a "B" 
> drive for a backup, NBU will find the tape "read only" and spit it out 
> and try another tape.  I want to avoid this tape search by suspending 
> all of our currently assigned tapes until the backups on those tapes 
> expire naturally.
> 
> How do I find a list of assigned tapes and the media servers they are 
> assigned to?  I'd like to write a single script that I run on the master 
> server to do all the tapes if possible.  I know I can use vmquery to 
> find out if a tape is assigned, but how, then, do you determine which 
> media server owns the tape so I can give bpexpdate all the information 
> it needs to suspend the tape?


-- 
Jack L. Forester, Jr.
UNIX Systems Administrator, Stf
Lockheed Martin Information Technology
(304) 625-3946