Thursday, January 19, 2012

TSM Device Handling in Windows

I have to say that TSM on Windows is good for small to medium size solutions and I'm not ANTI-Windows. I just cringe when dealing with devices in Windows. I hate its driver handling and most of all I hate how Windows presents library and tape drives. So I was working with a TSM server where the tape library would not initialize. It was an older SCSI library, not Fiber. I tried restarting the library, the TSM server, reloading drivers, and updating the drivers and nothing worked.

Duh! <Head Slap!!!>

That's because on the initial reboot that caused the library to stop communicating the device ID's changed. So the library went from LB1.0.0.2 to LB1.0.0.3. Nobody touched the SCSI card or library but the device definition changed! Seriously?  All the drives changed to mtX.X.X.3 also. Now I don't use Windows all that much but luckily I remembered the TSMDLST program that is installed with the TSM server. It's under C:\Porgram Files\tivoli\tsm\console and will pull the information from Windows for you in a readable format. So next time your library goes offline make sure you use it to compare the device definitions and serials with what is defined in TSM. It will save you a lot of time and headache. You can find more information on issues like this here.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Chad,
    I was setting up a new TSM V6.2 server on Win2008 with a TS3310 last week, and came across a useful command 'q osdevices'.

    This showed the library & drive device name, scsi id, element number and serial number, which is very handy.

    No TSM Device driver installed in this case, just using the IBM device drivers for Windows.
    (SAN Discovery isn't enabled on the TSM Server either).
    Thought I'd mention it..
    Chris_J

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