In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Prather, Wanda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> says:
>
>Len, FWIW, I have seen the same behavior and talked with the STK specialist
>here.
>
>He said that the cleaning light comes on for two different things -
>sometimes it means "clean requested", and sometimes means "clean required".
>There is a tiny cable that goes from the drives back to the robot (at least
>in our robot). With hardware cleaning on, that is how the "clean required"
>gets back to the robot and causes it to mount the cleaning tape. A "clean
>request" doesn't.
>
>This guy usually knows what he is talking about, and it explained the
>results I saw here - sometimes when the clean light was on a clean occurred,
>and sometimes it didn't. That may also explain the results you have seen
>with software cleaning. I don't think TSM has any way to sense that the
>drive is in degraded mode, or in a "clean request" rather than a "clean
>required" state, because I don't think the hardware sends any data back.
>It's an unfortunate design issue with the hardware (and using one yellow
>light to mean two different things when you can't tell which is which is
>just part of the problem.).
>
Hello Wanda
Yes there seems to be fuzzyness with these drives. I will not claim to
understand the in and outs of the api for the dlt7000, but in a fit
of despair, I spend an evening reading the dlt7000 manual. And it
appears that if software is written all of the data is available
for the asking. The small wire going to the robot is interesting
in that it's programing does not seemed to be spelled out in the
quantum manual. It features may be in the stk extensions.
As far as I understand if TSM is using the drive, the robot can not
clean the drive until TSM dismounts the tape, but there does not
seem to be any way for the robot to tell the software to stop using
the drive. And if the drive is not cleared of the problem, either
because the cleaning cart is used up, or the drive has problems
that can not be cleared with cleaning, etc. The robot also can not
tell the software not to use the drive. The software has to get a
really bad fatal error before it will down the drive.
The stk ce can uncable the dlt7000 from the backup server and use
a portable pc to unload the error data stored in the drive. it would be
nice if we could get that data from the robot or via the software
without the need to take apar the hardware.
len
