The following information describes the TMS as installed at CERN. In general, the description is also valid for outside sites where the TMS is also installed, such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, where the product originated, and IN2P3 and Saclay in France.
The Tape Management System (TMS) has been installed at CERN to manage the tapes and cartridges used at CERN. Information on some 450,000 volumes is held in a central database and may be queried and, in some cases, updated by users.
Note that FATMEN automatically issues TMS commands where necessary, and so a detailed knowledge of the TMS and the command syntax is not required. However, it may be useful to have a general overview of the system. Note that all access to TMS information through FATMEN is via a generic name, and not a tape number.
The TMS system runs in a special service machine and, as is the case for other service machines, does not accept commands directly but rather through a special interface. For other service machines the interface is SMSG, but TMS uses instead the SYSREQ interface (again from RAL) which handles automatic continuati of responses to queries and which allows (following modifications at CERN) queries from other CERN machines.
The SYSREQ interface is also available on remote machines, such as the central VAXcluster VXCERN, the Cray, the Siemens, SHIFT etc. This remote interface runs over TCP/IP and is contained in the CERN Program Library entry CSPACK.
A TMS query may be issued as follows:
SYSREQ TMS QUERY VID YZ0001
and similarly for other TMS commands. Note that descriptions of TMS commands in the various help files generally omit the "SYSREQ TMS", but this is always needed.
A list of all TMS commands is available via the command XFIND TMS on --------- CERNVM. On remote systems, this information is available through the www browser. To access the XFIND information directly, use a script such as
# XFIND script www "http://crnvmc/FIND" $@
and then use the command XFIND TMS as on CERNVM. ---------
In either case you can then find information on a specific command of interest. To find information about a particular TMS command directly use the commands XFIND TMS command, e.g. -----------------
xfind tms query