A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I wrote a bash shell script to do a daily query of the activity log to extract tape mounts and same them to a history file that could be used by perl to see how long the tape has been in use and how many times it has been mounted. Does not give any idea of how well you are streaming a tape but at least you could know if it was really, really old or if it had been mounted a gazillion times. I email myself alerts when a tape has reached a predetermined age or has been mounted a certain number of times and should be replaced. I am not fluent in shell scripts or perl so obviously isn't that hard to do. Depending on how long you keep your tapes and how many there are, the history file could get rather large.
Roger Deschner wrote: > > I am having a pattern of this as well. I think that some tapes in my > library are being used much more heavily than others, and they are > simply wearing out. > > I started out in December 2002 with all new SDLT tapes and a brand-new > library with new drives. Since then 3 of the new tapes have had this > "media fault" condition. As I am researching this, I am finding that > they are among the most heavily used tapes. > > ITSM does not give us any decent statistics on this. Useage numbers are > kept for a "volume", not for a "libvol", which is a serious shortcoming. > This means that these useage and error statistics are lost each time a > tape is reclaimed and returned to the scratch pool. ..snip -- Steve Bennett, (907) 465-5783 State of Alaska, Information Technology Group, Technical Services Section
