Tape control <MIXED> why it appears the same as ACTIVE?

[Jim-90]

Got a couple of tapes with control being given as <MIXED> they are fully functional and the control for individual media servers appears to be no different from a tape drive that a control status of ACTIVE    

Accoprding to the manual description <MIXED>   but what I see this could also apply to ACTIVE where I have four media servers -> 2xTLD, 1x SCAN-TLD, 1x ACTIVE. 

"The control mode for a shared drive may not be the same on all hosts that share the drive. For shared drives each host can have a different status for the drive. The status of individual paths to the drive appears in the Drive Path column. If the control modes are all the same, that mode appears."

Any ideas where  ACTIVE control = <MIXED> control.

[RamNagalla]

<MIXED> status will show when tape drive has different status for different media server that share the same drive.( its a overall status of the Drive derived from all media server sharing the same Drive)

and you have 1 Active , and  3 TLD(include scan-tld).. so indicates the same Drive has 2 states.. active  and TLD, which is MIXED.

and the media server having the Active Drive status is the one which is currently using it.

so in case of Shared Drive.. if one media server has Active..and rest as TLD.. the over all status is MIXED.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

In my experience MIXED status is when tape drive is UP (TLD) on one or more media server and DOWN on one or more media server.

ACTIVE is when drive is in use by one media server. SCAN-TLD means the drive is the scan host and UP (TLD control).

It is easier to comment when you show us details of devices in your environment. On master server, run these commands:

vmoprcmd

vmdareq

Please post output of these commands. 
(If you don't want to show media server names, replace with media1, media2, etc)

[sksujeet]

I agree with Marianne, if you have the drive shared with multiple media servers and if few paths are up and few are down then it will show as mixed, if all the path are down then it will show as down.

Please post the output as per above post or provide us screenshots.

[Jim-90]

That is what I have seen in the past as well.  In this case all drives are up. 

In case the GUI was lying I checked  each media server with tpconfig -d  it confirmed the GUI was reporting reality.

[Marianne]

Use vmoprcmd and vmdareq rather than tpconfig. 
This output is more accurate than tpconfig. 
tpconfig is for device configuration status, vmoprcmd is for current usage and activity status.

I have learned many years ago not to trust the GUI for drive status, as it does not refresh often enough and will give incorrect status if there was a comms issue with a media server during the last scan/probe from the master.

[Jim-90]

vmdareq -a did it for me, all the other commands gave the impression everything was OK.  

Once indetified it was a simple process of UPping the drives where required.