Tim S.'s questions

I have some LTO tape drives, and use cleaning tapes as required, but the lifetime of the cleaning tapes is not as predictable as I would have expected. I'm looking for a way to query the system, whether it be the robot (Quantum i6000) or Veritas Netbackup to see if the tape has actually expired.

Honestly I'm not exactly sure what causes a tape to be expired -- I'd assume it winds to the end and stops, so it doesn't reuse a previously used section. Currently Netbackup is storing the number of "available cleans" in the "number of times mounted" field, which always starts out at 50, but I've noticed cleaning tapes can expire after as few as 15 cleaning cycles, perhaps for a particularly dirty drive. Thanks.

I am attempting to list and categorize all connected disks on a host; local and SAN-connected. The SAN use various types of adapters (namely Emulex and Qlogic) so scanning the FC bus can be somewhat unreliable (some hosts use both types for whatever reason). Basically I am gathering data for various reporting and analytics.

My question is this: if I use 'blkid' to list local disks, and 'lsscsi' to list the SAN devices attached via fibrechannel, will that encompass all of the disks connected to the host?

I've not had a lot of experience with either command to know the in's and out's of them, so I wanted to see if their results are reliable enough to build a data framework.

I should note that this is a heavily scrutinized environment and extraneous tools will not be permitted to be installed.