Re: Preventive Maintenance Question

Jerry, I recently had an error similar to yours, In my case a SLR60 drive
and 2 pairs of 4326 ( 35GB ) drives mirrored, The system had been running
without errors for months. I as hired to do an OS upgrade and I wanted a
full system save. This 520 was a web server so it was pretty static and the
client had not been doing backups. I had some tape interface errors just
rying to init the tape, but did get a clean backup. I did notice after the
backup both mirrored pairs had a failed unit. Since the internal tape drive
and the disks share the same controller ( and SCSI Bus ), We had IBM
repleace the tape drive. NO more errors. Rebuilt the mirrored drives did the
OS upgrade via Images catalog and no errors. I can only assume the tape
drive was the problem.

You may be seeing the same type of problem, since the errors are when the
tape is in use.

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Jerry Adams <Jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For the second time in less than a month we had a critical system condition
last night. Both times it occurred during our nightly backup procedure.
Errors were reported for the 6384 (cartridge) tape drive and three or four
of the disk drives (4326's) of which we only have four [4]. To me it is
sort of funny (not in a hilarious way mind you) that the same scenario
occurred (i.e., trying to use tape drive, disk errors reported).

The tape drive's error SRC was 63A09100 (a tape unit failed). The disk
drive SRC's were 43263109 (May indicate a disk unit failure) and a couple of
57099030 (which I can't find). The tape drive went into FAILED status on
the WRKCFGSTS *DEV display. The disk drives (three [3] last night, four [4]
on 20 April) never actually failed; that is, we were able to do SAVLIB's to
Save Files and FTP to a separate machine.

Both times IBM replaced one of the disk drives (we use RAID5), and the
system rebuilt the disks. Speculation (my term) is that the tape drive,
which is on the same bus as the disk drives (or so I was told), went into a
FAILED status because the disks were sending so many errors that the bus got
clogged up and ergo the tape drive timed out (or something along those
lines; I wasn't taking very good notes at the time). In neither event was
anything done to the tape drive, except to vary it off/on (i.e., no repairs
of any kind).

Service Tools' Product Activity Log (PAL) is also showing an error
(B6005120) on a 2844 device which, I think, is the RAID card (anyway, it is
a card in our 520), though WRKPRB does not list it. There were five [5] of
these all with the same timestamp about one [1] minute before PAL shows the
43263109 errors on the disk units.

I know that disks fail; been there, done that, got the souvenir. But I
(and my boss) was wondering if it could be something less obvious causing
the problem. More to the point something that could be diagnosed using some
kind of hardware diagnostics tools either in our tool kit (iNav, SST, or
something to which we have access), or in the CE's tool set. I'm a firm
believer in "An ounce of prevention..." adage, not the "If it ain't
broke..." one.


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

When we played, World Series checks meant something. Now all they do is
screw up your taxes. -Don Drysdale
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.