Monday, April 30, 2007

Audit Library Issue

I had something crazy happen this weekend with our STK L700. It somehow ended up needing an audit of the library, but when we would run the audit it would fail. Failure of a command I can live with but there was no supporting messages to explain the cause of the failure. The library was rebooted multiple times, but the audit still was failing. Finally my resourceful manager Steve ran an audit library with the PVR and MMS flags and the audit completed successfully. The one thing it could have been was from a stuck tape in a tape drive, but why no context message to explain the failure? We had deleted the drive and the path and the tape should have been removed on the first audit since it could no longer be seen.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Old Admin Tool

If you ever used the old Windows Admin GUI from 3.1-3.7 then you might have liked some of the features, what I was wondering was why didn't someone write something similar in Java? Since it would then work cross platform it makes sense to write an Admin tool in Java. Keep it small and simple and we'd all be happy.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

New TSM administration

I use a small PERL script which helps me to administrate my TSM servers.

What do you use or need when you administrate your TSM servers?

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

TSM SQL Tutorials

If you are like many admins out there you might not be very versed in the SQL side of TSM. Luckily, PJ from ADSM.org posted some great TSM SQL tutorial links that I think everyone could benefit from. There is a beginner and an advanced lesson, so there is something for everyone. Check them out.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Servergraph Help!

If anyone out there uses Servergraph and would be willing to give some pointers or insight into it I would be indebted. This product is VERY complex and it leaves a new user wondering where to start. So please help if you can!

Split TSM servers (same platform)

One of our customers has a TSM sevrer with a very big TSM database (100G) and wants to split this big TSM server database into two TSM servers.

The plan is to install a new TSM server instance and load this big TSM database into this new instance. We want to separate these two TSM servers in the following way: we would delete those nodes from the original TSM server that we would keep in the new/another instance and vica versa based on the storage pool usage (means keep/delete whole storage pools on TSM servers).

/* The new instance will be a library client of the original TSM server which will be a library manager. */

What do you think of it? Will it work or not?

Monday, April 02, 2007

X Windows GUI Gone!

I was performing a DR recently and while trying to do a large HP/UX system restore found that the TSM X-Windows GUI was not in the client directory. Upon further investigation it turns out that Tivoli has switched to a complete Java GUI. While this works fine the problem is with Java. During the DR test I was allowed to install java but on the production systems the customer does not want Java installed. So with no X-Windows client and the inability to use java the command line is the only option. Now this is fine when restoring individual files, filesystems, and so forth, but I found restoring a VERY large server with 20+ filesystems is a whole lot easier and faster with the GUI. So the lack of an X-Windows client could be an issue if like many companies you don't install java on your UNIX servers.