Tape monitor daemon (tmd)

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The Tape Monitor Daemon is introduced in the version of IBMtape.4.0.9.2 or later. It is designed to run concurrently with the IBMtape driver. It automatically retrieves and stores the IBM® tape drive diagnostic information (drive dump) into the /var/opt/IBMtape directory. The daemon is automatically started when the driver is installed, even when no tape device is attached on the system. An entry name="IBMtape" parent="pseudo" instance=16383; is also entered into the configuration file of /usr/kernel/drv/IBMtape.conf automatically for the daemon during the IBMtape driver installation.

The following options can be used to configure the tape monitor daemon, running it on the command line. Most options can also be specified in the /etc/tmd.conf configuration file. However, the command line options override any configuration file options.

-s   Stop any currently running instance of the tape monitor daemon.
-r   Restart the tape monitor daemon and reload all configuration settings.
-d   Turn on drive error diagnostic retrieval and storage.
     This option is enabled by default.
-D   Turn off drive error diagnostic retrieval and storage.
-p   <directory>  Specify an alternate directory for the storage of
     drive diagnostic information. Default directory is /var/opt/IBMtape
-l   <filename>  Specify a file for writing daemon related log messages.
     By default, the tmd only writes status information to the syslog file of
     /var/adm/messages.
-y   Turns off writing log messages to syslog.
-z   Turn off compression.  By default, the tmd will use a form of file compression
     to reduce the size of stored diagnostic information.

The file name of dump presents some useful information. An example of the dump file is

IBMtape.000001300148.2004-04-09-14:54:14.dump.gz

Here, 000001300148 represents the serial number of the tape device, 2004-04-09-14:54:14 is the time stamp for the dump retrieval.

A message is also logged in the syslog file of /var/adm/messages after a drive dump is retrieved by tmd. For example,

Apr  9 14:54:21 Java tmd[3279]: Drive dump saved to /var/opt/IBMtape
    IBMtape.000001300148.2004-04-09-14:54:14.dump.