I spent yesterday afternoon upgrading our TS7530, and in my fad I also upgraded TSM to 5.5.3. Now, once I started TSM it quickly started complaining about the paths to the drives.

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ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR03
(/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape03) is taken offline.
ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR03
(/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape03) is taken offline.
HBA_LoadLibrary: previously unfreed libraries exist, call HBA_FreeLibrary().
ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR07
(/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape07) is taken offline.
ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR07
(/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape-07) is taken offline.

I thought maybe this is a mere device problem (we have had them before), so I rebooted the boxes. But still no luck and I went home after about an hour of trying without any luck. In the morning, my co-worker called our trustworthy IBM service partner, and the TSM consultant said he had the exact, same problem yesterday. We would have two options:

  1. Enable the option SANDISCOVERY, with the ( completely undocumented) Passive setting (setopt SANDISCOVERY PASSIVE)
  2. Downgrade back to 5.5.2

For now, we implemented the first option, in the hope that’ll solve our troubles. And it actually does.