Well, speaking from the land of painful experience, yes you can have TSM
overwrite a tape owned by another ACSLS application. That said, I believe
that the longer answer would include the phrase "in some instances." If all
of the applications lock the tapes they are using then I don't think TSM
will be able to grab one and I know that TSM locks the tapes that it uses.
My experience was with the STK CAM application. That application does not
lock tapes it has used so it is possible for TSM to allocate one of CAM's
tapes and write all over it. Not good.
You need to avoid gross library commands within TSM. For instance, if you
issue a label libvol search=yes command you can have problems. You should
use volrange= and specify the tapes you know TSM can have. However, it is
possible to define a volrange that overlaps with tapes owned by another
application (yes, that's what I did) and have data go into the great beyond.
Careful procedures will prevent the problem. Media management in a mixed
environment is always hard. What's to stop someone from removing the
barcode label from a tape and replacing it with another, different label?
This would cause data loss completely independent of application software.
I've seen this happen in production environments with ensuing data loss.
There are no guarantees in this game. The software does it's best but human
error can result in problems.
Kelly J. Lipp
Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc.
PO Box 51313
Colorado Springs CO 80949-1313
(719) 531-5926
Fax: (240) 539-7175
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.storsol.com
www.storserver.com
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
Walker, Lesley R
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 10:49 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: TSM security - sharing STK library with other apps
Does anyone have experience of using an ACSLS-controlled STK library and
sharing it with other applications?
Our customer is very concerned about the possibility of Application A being
able to read/overwrite tapes belonging to Application B, and the question
has been asked:
Most (all?) tape management systems have the ability to automatically
load the entire ACSLS database into their own database and this is where
the main risk arises. Does TSM have this ability?
They will be implementing access control, but it's not in place yet. Can I
assure them that TSM will not be a security risk?
(Version 3.7.3 on Solaris)
--
Lesley Walker
Distributed Systems Services, EDS New Zealand
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with
18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons,
computers in the future by the year 2000, may have
only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons"
Popular Mechanics, March 1949
