Hi,
I figure I would give you all an update on the problems I had with this process. After a lot of discussion, IBM has admitted that they have in fact published incorrect procedures for upgrading the firmware on the 3583 library. If you follow the incorrect procedures it will leave you library unusable! Furthermore the erroneous procedure was published in more than one document. I can only speak with certainty to the process I followed and that it was definitely flawed. I have no idea whether the other methods are valid or not. I attempted to do a firmware update via the SCSI bus from an AIX based system using tapeutil. The flawed procedure neglects to have you open the library for R/W from tapeutil prior to placing the library in the firmware update mode. Once this occurs there is no way for the normal user to recover from it, IBM service most get involved in order to recover from it.
In our situation, the customer did not have support for the library. 3583 maintenance cost are ridiculously high, in fact the yearly cost is more than what it would cost to purchase a refurbished library! So the customer was fully willing to take that chance and be down if need be for a short while. However in this case we felt that IBM was responsible for the corruption of the firmware (i.e. due to there published procedures being in error) and that they should provide support to get it fixed. Well after 2 days of fighting with IBM support and IBM Global Services we finally got a fix. But what was truly amazing is that the fix was simply a modified version of the program used for doing serial cable firmware updates and the running of 3 commands for a total of about 20 minutes of my time! They could have solved this problem on day one if they would have taken 5 minutes to send me an email with the program and the 3 commands I needed to run, but instead IBM must have wasted 50 or 60 man hours discussing it, have conference calls, pushing responsibility around, deciding who would pay for it, and a whole lot more crap that I can't even begin to explain.
Bottom line we are backup and running. As a word of caution if you are going to do firmware updates to your 3583, I recommend using the serial cable approach. If you can't do that then do it through the RMU. However, if you feel you must do it through the SCSI interface make sure you have the correct procedures, i.e. ones that include opening the library for R/W in tapeutil prior to putting the library into the firmware update mode. IBM claims they will be removing the bad documents put I have no idea how long that will take.
I now know more about 3583 firmware updates than I ever wanted to know!
-- Regards, Mark D. Rodriguez President MDR Consulting, Inc.
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Mark D. Rodriguez wrote:
Hi,
I am trying to upgrade a 3583 to the latest (V3_30_08) firmawre from V3_10_04. I originally tried to do this from an AIX V5.2 system that was SCSI attached to the library. I tried to do the SCSI upgrade as described in several different IBM documents. This upgrade timed out and failed after 10 minutes stating that the connection had timed out. We re-tried but got the same resuults. Now at this point the library is unusable since it will not reboot!
I then went on to try to do a firmware update using the serial port. This requires the use of a windows box. We used a W2K system and attached a serial cable (basically a null modem cable) between the two. I have had to do this in the past and it worked, but this time it is failing. The message returned is:
Received specific board ALIVE. Error: This download utility is for a IBM 3583 library. You have a different library.
This is in fact an IBM 3583 but for some reason it will not allow us to do the firmware update.
If you have any suggestions on how I can at least get the library to boot up that would be a great help. Further, if you have an idea on how to get the firmware updated that would be even better.
Thank You.
