Tape Cartridge Cleaning Frequency

I (we) have two [2] model 520's each with a 6384 tape drive. This morning the tape drive's little amber "my-nose-needs-wiping" light was on for one of them. Inserted the tape drive cleaning cartridge, and the light went out. All pretty normal stuff, granted.

The thing is that about three months ago I started indicating the system (box) on which the cleaning was done, as well as the date. Since then (1 February) all loggings have gone against only one of the boxes. Both boxes use approximately the same number of tape uses (nightly backups, Save *All, etc.). The weekly tape error report [ PRTERRLOG TYPE(*VOLSTAT) VOLTYPE(6384) VOLSTAT(*DLT) ] hasn't shown anything out of the ordinary. The Service Action Log in System Service Tools doesn't show any errors on the tape drive (don't know if a bad light would log or not) going back to 1 January of last year.

I guess it's possible that the box that I cleaned today just gets dirty faster, except that they are sitting about six inches apart on a table. Plus for some reason I thought that the amber light was triggered by either a time interval (like the cache batteries replacement message) or some usage count, rather than an analog condition.

So my questions are these:

* How often should a cartridge tape drive be cleaned (one which uses an average of one [1] tape per day)?

* Is there any way to determine (aside from a re-ipl, which exercises the lights) if the light is working? (I tried the lamp test (option 4). It didn't test the tape drive's lights, but it did turn on the system attention light for a long time.)



Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
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B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx