On Fri, 1 Oct 1993 11:09:08 CDT Jim O'Leary said:
>We set the cartridge RECLAIM level to 30% and, as expected, WDSF has
>emptied several cartridges.  The problem is that I was ALSO expecting it
>to start reusing the empty tapes instead of asking for new ones.  Is
>this supposed to happen or do we have to manually work to get the tapes
>back into the stream?  (We use VMTAPE, and VMTAPE still shows that DSSERV
>is the owner of the tapes, so we would need to return it to SCRATCH status
>in order for it to be made available again).

I think I know what's going on.  Refer to Chapter 9 of the WDSF Administrator's
Guide & Reference, "Managing WDSF/VM Tapes".

         "If a volume is mounted that has not been predefined to the
         server, the server adds this volume to its configuration
         dynamically.  When such a volume becomes empty (after
         subsequent deletions or reclamations), it is automatically
         deleted from the repository configuration."

So, it sounds like if you want reclaimed tapes to be re-used, then they must
be assigned to (owned by) DSSERV.  When a VMTAPE SCRATCH tape is released by
WDSF, it cannot be re-allocated by VMTAPE until it has been expired.  I see
no way to automate this expiration, as I see no way to tell VMTAPE that WDSF
is through with the SCRATCH tape.

We pre-allocate tapes to the WDSF server (using the DEFINE VOLUME command)
and try not to make use of VMTAPE SCRATCH tapes at all.  However, if WDSF
ran out of pre-allocated tapes, and started using SCRATCH tapes, we would
end up with the same problem you have identified.  It would be a pain to find
the list of tapes that WDSF used and released, and then expire them to VMTAPE.
It would be nice if there were a WDSF "tape release exit" that would be called
whenever WDSF deleted the tape from its repository configuration.

..Paul