Logging TSM Restores

If your wondering who is restoring files, and what they’re restoring, you can capture that information to a custom log file. It’s a pain to get the same kind of data out of the activity log, but you can dump it to a “formatted” text file. You can send it to a user defined script or program too. The offending codes we’re looking at are ANR0503 and ANR0504.

First, we need some options added to our dsmserv.opt file:

REPORTRETRIEVE YES
FILETEXTEXIT YES /var/log/tsm_res.log APPEND

The REPORTRETRIEVE option tells the server to log restores. You could stop with that, and be content to do searches of the activity log manually via the client. This will increase the volume of activity in the log, maybe significantly depending on how many restores you do. The FILETEXTEXIT command writes the specified lines to a file. And, we want it to startup automatically on reboot, write to the /var/log/tsm_res.log file, and APPEND new lines to that file. Once you’ve made these changes, bounce the TSM instance.

Now we have to go into the TSM admin client and enable the events to the exit with:

ENABLE EVENTS FILETEXT ANR0503,ANR0504

You can check the status of the receiver with “Q ENABLED FILETEXT”. You could also add “NODENAME=xxxxxx” to enable this for just certain nodes, which is pretty cool if you need to watch just a handfull of nodes.

There are a few more options for the above commands, check your Admin command reference or the TSM Infocenter website for other options.

The output in the file looks a lot like the TSM activity log, with a few fields added, like the date and the TSM server name.