[NCLUG] Help with a DLT4000

Martin Gelfand gelfand at lamar.colostate.edu
Sun Apr 1 15:19:15 MDT 2001


> 
> 
> 
> 	I'm trying to see if this DLT 4000 drive is installed or what is called.
> The machine is a dell 2300 power edge with Redhat 6.1, I know that I need to
> upgrade that is why I need to back the machine up.  I know the location of
> the drive on the SCSI chain but this is something very new to me.  I would
> like to use Arkeia tape backup since the other network admins are none linux
> admins.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks again,
> Bryan
> 

The scsi id of the tape drive is irrelevant; you should be able
to access the device as /dev/st0 (or /dev/nst0, for the 
no-rewind-after-completing-the-operation version).

This assumes, of course, that your kernel has scsi tape support.
You should probably see your tape drive recognized during the
boot sequence; check dmesg for something like the following...
(I have an Ecrix drive attached to an Adaptec 2930)

(scsi0) <Adaptec AIC-7860 Ultra SCSI host adapter> found at PCI 0/9/0 
(scsi0) Narrow Channel, SCSI ID=7, 3/255 SCBs 
(scsi0) Cables present (Int-50 YES, Ext-50 NO) 
(scsi0) Downloading sequencer code... 422 instructions downloaded 
scsi0 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.31/3.2.4        
        <Adaptec AIC-7860 Ultra SCSI host adapter> 
scsi : 1 host. 
(scsi0:0:3:0) Synchronous at 10.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 15.   
  Vendor: ECRIX     Model: VXA-1 V219191B    Rev: 0001   
  Type:   Sequential-Access                  ANSI SCSI revision: 02 
Detected scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 3, lun 0     

If the scsi card is detected but the tape drive is not, you'll
need to modprobe st (I think that's all that's necessary; this
assumes that the st module has been built).

A quick check if things are likely to work is to do a
mt -f /dev/st0 status
(as root, unless you've set looser permissions on /dev/st0)
and see if you get back something like

drive type = Generic SCSI-2 tape
drive status = -2147482624
sense key error = 0
residue count = 0
file number = 0
block number = 0
Tape block size 1024 bytes. Density code 0x80 (unknown).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
 BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN            

which is what the Ecrix reports when there's no tape loaded.

If you're having problems it's a good idea to first check if
the scsi controller "knows" the drive is attached, by seeing
what you can glean from the scsi-bios.

Hope this helps,
Martin Gelfand
Dept of Physics, Colorado State




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