Archiving The Actlog

I just had a friend e-mail me and state he was being contacted by his previous employer complaining he made changes to their TSM retention times causing them to lose data. The TSM admin who took over is blaming him stating he changed the retention and now the data is gone. My friend does not remember making any retention changes and the problem is that any change to the copygroup updates the "Last Update by (administrator)" and the "Last Update Date/Time" so it's not substantial evidence of who did what. The only way to verify what had really occurred would be to either keep the actlog for an extremely long period of time, or dump it to a text file that you zip and archive. (Even then it's a text file and could be tampered with) In the case of my friend, he left the company last November and anyone could have altered the copygroup since then.

How many of you archive your TSM Activity Log, and how long do you keep it for? Obviously it good for security and tracking purposes, but who manages it and can you reliably keep it in a read-only state? Of course this is also a case where a bi-monthly audit of retention settings would have helped.

Funny TSM v6.2.2.0 install message ;-)

Windows Admins & VSS

I've been running into a number of Windows Admins lately who are not familiar with the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service. I guess you have to be an admin who works with backups to have any familiarity with it??? Is this common?  If you have admins who seem to lack knowledge of VSS I would recommend the following MS TechNet library reference. Lately I've been dealing with the object enumeration and missing system writer issues, if anyone has found a solution for the object enumeration issue I'm all ears!!!

TSM v6.x

I'm curious to find out your opinion about the TSM v6 published a few years ago.

Do you use v6 at all, are you afraid to use it? what about deduplication or simple you are just satisfied with v5?

And of course what about the ITM and ISC/AC/TIP whatever this is called?

I'm really interested in your view!

Cheers.

/* I opened the same topic at: adsm.org. */

tsmadm.pl

This is to let you know tsmadm.pl v1beta RC2 has been published.

In brief, this program will make your daily TSM work easier by using the entire terminal size with colors and by redefining the existing commands or by extending the original ones.

In addition, the program can handle historical/archive data as well!!!

See details at: tsmadm.pl

Will you try it and send us your experiences or suggestions?

You can also contact us via several other ways:

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TSM Symposium 2011

Don't forget: TSM Symposium 2011: http://tsm2011.uni-koeln.de/
( 27th-30th September 2011 at the Hilton Hotel, Dresden )

What Problem? It's Working As Designed!

When upgrading from TSM 5.x to 6.x you have probably found that your select queries don't return in table format but in list format. You ask yourself, "WTH is going on here?" First off don't complain to IBM, it's "working as designed." You see with the change of the TSM DB to DB2 many of table column widths have changed. To have your select statements return in table format IBM states that you should use the CAST function on certain (if not all) columns. Otherwise, the best alternative is to save the results in commadelimited format and open the data in Excel. Here's the APAR??? that states it's not a problem. To quote Lady Gaga, TSM 6.x was "Born This Way!"

NOTE: Is it me or does IBM's last example leave one scratching their head wondering how using cast helped???