Changing the System Date on your TSM Server and TSM Expiration

Below are two tips that often catch people out when managing their TSM Server. Hope you find them useful.

[step="" title="Tip 1 : TSM Expiration"]

Expiring old backup and archive data from TSM is controlled by the EXPINTERVAL in your dsmserv.opt file.

EXPINTERVAL=24  specifies to run the expire process every 24 hours.
EXPINTERVAL=0 disables automatic expiration.

Removing old data from TSM can be run manually using the expire inventory command. Data is expired using the "Management Class" definitions that you have set on your files or if none are defined then the defaults for the policy set are used.  ( I will discuss policy sets in an upcoming article )

In version 5 expiration can only be run system wide, in version 6 you can run the expire inventory command on individual nodes, this is useful when changing management classes on individual nodes.

I recommend that you set the EXPINTERVAL to 0 so that you can control at what time this process runs and the setup an admin schedule to run the expire inventory command
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[step="" title="Tip 2 : TSM and changing System Date"]

If you change the date on the underlying Operating System that your TSM Server is running on you will need to run the ACCEPT DATE command. If TSM is up when the date change occurs then you can login to the TSM Server using the Admin CLI or TSM Studio and run the ACCEPT DATE command.

If your server was down and your windows TSM Server service will not start. Check the event log or console messages for the following error

TSM Server Error: Server: SERVER_NAME ANR0110E An unexpected system date has been detected; the server is disabled. Verify the system date and use the ACCEPT DATE command to establish the current date as valid.

If you are unable to access the server from the ADMIN CLI then go to the command prompt or unix shell, change to the directory where dsmserv.exe (just dsmserv on unix) is installed and run it. When you see the above message enter ACCEPT DATE and once the new date has been accepted run the HALT command to stop TSM and start the TSM Server in the normal way for that Operating System.

Why do you need to do this
If someone has accidently changed the Operating System date to a future date and the expiration process runs then a lot of data could be lost.
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Hope you find these tips / tricks useful and save you some grief.