Thursday, August 25, 2016

Why Are You Not Using Google & YouTube?

I had an OS Admin contact me through LinkedIn and G-Mail asking for help on trying to find his archived data. He didn't have much experience with TSM and was looking for information on how to find the long term backups (i.e. Archives). I asked him if he even tried to search Google? Google and YouTube are great resources for all your needs. For example if you want  to learn more about the new Operations Center you can see a plethora of videos by searching YouTube. You can also use google to find all sorts of related documents and pages when it concerns APARs and errors. If you haven't done your due diligence you make yourself look dumb. Shoot, you can even search Google from my website and get my posts and outside relevant web pages!

So here is a list of YouTube videos you can reference:

Backup and Archive

Server Administration

Setup TSM Deduplication

Tivoli Data Protection Agents

TDP for Virtual Environments






Monday, July 11, 2016

TSM Explorer

I've been notified by the developer of TSMExplorer that a more current free edition is available for anyone looking for a GUI based management tool for TSM. Below is a brief note from the developer.

"TSMExplorer GUI is  free application for TSM server management. The solution is a comfortable tool to control and manage from a single sign-on. This version is free for works with  version TSM 5.x 6.1 6.2”


Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Restoring TSM Without A Volhist

Someone in the comments to an old post just asked for directions/instructions on restoring TSM without a volume history or devconfig file. Well, I got some bad news and some not so bad but not fun news. We will start with the not so bad news. If you don't have a devconfig, don't panic! You can recreate the devconfig. That's fairly simple, just a pain. TSM has to have a devconfig file to initialize its devices so if the devconfig is not present you'll have to create one. Typically you do this when you rebuild a TSM instance. For example at a DR site you install TSM on the DR server, define the dsmserv.opt, and then you define base devices on the new install. Once that has been done you can bring down TSM and attempt a restore using the newly defined device(s). 

Now for the bad news. Without the volhist, if you don't know what volume(s) were used for DBBAckup your kind of screwed. The old DSMSERV DISPLAY DBBACKUPVOLUME command has been removed/deleted and IBM now says the following

DSMSERV DISPLAY DBBACKUPVOLUME - Information about volumes used for database backup is available from the volume history file. The volume history file is now required to restore the database. 

You can find a list of TSM Server deleted commands, utilities, and options at the following link.


Monday, April 11, 2016

DR Test - Things learned

I just did a DR test from one data center to another involving TSM and our Data Domain (DD) which we have configured for NFS and VTL usage. Things to know...


  1. We backup the TSM DB to the DD NFS file system
  2. The TSM server was not brought up on its own LPAR in the DR site, but shared with an alternate TSM instance.
  3. The DR site could not facilitate LAN-Free like the primary site.

So we built the secondary instance on the LPAR currently running a TSM server that services the customer's development environment. Then I disabled the replication pair and we mounted it to the LPAR so we could restore the TSM DB. This is where our main problem rose it's head. The NFS file system from the DD was mounting under the primary TSM instances ID, So while we wrestled for this for an hour or so, I realized after Googling the issue and reading the DD notes from people that the problem was the configuration. I would have been fine disabling the replication pair and mounting it to the TSM LPAR if it had been the default user ID, but the primary instance was the owner and we could not change permissions due to what is allowed by the default ID and settings from the DD. So I had to unmount the DD NFS file system to delete the pair on the DD then remount it with the full read/write permissions. I was then able to mount it under an alternate ID. Once we overcame this we were able to start the TSM DB restore which is where our second issue arose.
We were restoring the TSM DB and the active logs were not being restored to the active log directory. The first time I used dsmserv restore db and it ran fine until all the DB records were restored and I received the following error:

ANR2970E Database rollforward terminated - DB2 sqlcode -1004 sqlerrmc TSMDB1

The restore process restored the logs to the instances home directory eventually filling the filesystem to 100% and erroring out. I thought the logs were recovery log related so I then added the RECOVERYLOGDir option to the restore command and got the same results. This wasted an hour to achieve the same results, so after some more Google searches and talking to IBM support I decided to add the ACTIVELOGDIR option to the restore. I didn't add it due to the IBM support tech suggesting it (he didn't) I just realized recovery log was not filled with any logs and the only other logs they could be are Active Log files. I added the ACTIVELOGDirectory option to the restore command and DB restored worked without any errors. The question is why didn't TSM use the ACTIVELOGDirectory option stated in the dsmserv.opt? The RECOVERYLOGDir option was used but the log for recovery were never more than maybe 1GB, but the active log was over 53GB and the db2diag.0.log registered the error that no recovery log directory was listed so the default would be used. What the hell??? It is listed in the dsmserv.opt...

ACTIVELOGDirectory          /drtsmserver/tsm30log
ARCHLOGDirectory            /drtsmserver/tsm30arch
MAXSESS 300
COMMTIMEOUT 6000
IDLETIMEOUT 6000
MAXSESSIONS 400
...

So I post this so you can learn from my mistakes. The final restore DB command was

dsmserv restore db on=db.list recoverydir=/drtsmserver/tsm30fail activelogdir=/drtsmserver/tsm30log

Tuesday, April 05, 2016

Find WWN's in AIX

So I use the following script to find WWN's in AIX. Does anyone have a better script they'd like to share?

#!/usr/bin/ksh

CSV="," 

for FCSX in `lscfg | grep fcs | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort`
do 
echo ${FCSX}${CSV}`lscfg -vl ${FCSX} | grep "Network Address" | sed -e "s/^.*\.//"`${CSV}`lscfg -l ${FCSX} | awk '{ print $2 }'` 
done

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Oracle RMAN Catalogue Cleanup - Revisited

Over a Decade ago I wrote an article on Object cleanup due to the issues with RMAN and our DBA's not keeping it sync'd with TSM. I then revisited it in 2007 and since then have not had to use it much. With version 6 of TSM I have not worried about my DB size, or old data not expiring since TSM seems to handle it somewhat better than the older versions did. I recently had to use the command and realized that the delete object command as it was used in TSM 5 is not 100% correct for TSM 6. So when trying to use the old command

TSM v5

delete object 0 [Object ID Number]
The 0 is telling TSM how many dependent objects to delete (at least I believe that's what it does, I can't fully remember). But with TSM 6 you don't need to provide the dependent object count in the command.

TSM v6 and higher

delete object [Object ID Number]

This command works (although it can sometimes take awhile to complete the command). So using the correct select you can produce a list and delete the objects from TSM. Reclamation with return the space but my understanding is that this is an individual expiration process and remember it is not a command support will help you with. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Here is the select:

select 'delete object', object_id from backups where node_name=[TDP NODENAME] and
backup_date < '2007-06-01 00:00:00'