BRENT@uwovax.UWO.CDN.UUCP (01/15/87)
Today our only system tape drive went awol. It ended up being
owned by a non-existant process. How it got that way is not
relevant, but I was informed by TSC that someone, somewhere, has
been previously disturbed by this feature of VMS, and wrote a
program to make such a lost tape drive available again (without
resorting to a reload).
Once in a row is too much, and so I beseech the author, or
anyone else who may have such program, to send it to me, please.
I have DECUS tapes from Spring and Fall 85 (Spring 86 not arrived
yet), but I don't know what to look for (program name or author).
If it appeared on any 1985 tape, a reference to it will suffice.
Thanks to all who will no doubt reply. B.
--
Brent Sterner
Lord Protector, d i g i t a l Systems
Computing & Communications Services
Natural Sciences Building
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7
Telephone (519)661-2151 x6036
Network <BRENT@uwovax.UWO.CDN> ! VAX 8600
<A105@UWOCC1.BITNET> ! IBM 4341"Thomas_W._Taylor.WBST147"@XEROX.COM.UUCP (02/05/87)
A similar problem occurred on one of our systems on VMS 3.something, but was supposed to be fixed in VMS 4. I haven't run the test to see if it is really fixed. If I correctly remember the scenario it went something like this: A (SYSTEM) user with a high default priority (9 if I recall corectly) logged off the system while the tape was still mounted and allocated. The rundown of the process and deallocation of devices was out of sync up so the device still thought it was owned by the high priority process. The work-around, of course, is not to have a high priority job or to dismount and/or deallocate before logging off. Is this the cause of your problem? twt