Weird TS3500 problem

Well, today we had a rather weird problem with our TS3500. TSM running on AIX basically went bonko and spit out weird media sense errors, all stating that there is a hardware or media error of unknown nature:

After restarting the TSM server (as in the service, not the whole box) five times, which didn’t resolve squat we decided to take a look at the TS3500 itself. We opened up the Management interface and tried moving a tape into a drive. That didn’t work. Hrmmmmm.

We tried the manual move from the LCD display mounted on the front of the TS3500 base frame, that didn’t work either. So we figured the gripper was stuck and placed a call with our trustworthy support provider.

After a few minutes, they called us back and told us: “Try the following: Place the library in “Pause”-Mode and open it up, maybe a tape fell down …“.

We did exactly that, the gripper moved back to it’s pause position (which is in the base frame), and we started looking inside after opening up the base frame and an expansion frame. Nothing …

So we closed it back up, and let the base frame resume it’s normal duties … guess what: After resuming normal operations, it worked again *shrug*