HP9000/DLT7000 problem

[Michael Francisco]

I have an HP 2/15 DLT library in which drive 1 is connected to a K260 and drive 2 is connected to an L2000. The robotics and backup to drive 1 work fine, but I cannot get drive 2 to perform a backup. When I try an execute a backup to drive 2 via OmniBack II V3.0, the robotics will load the tape into Drive 2 but OmniBack will eventually timeout trying to write to /dev/rmt/c4t4d0BEST and I usually get a device busy or device does not exist error message. Performing an ioscan -fn on the L2000 will return /dev/rmt/c4t4d0BEST as being the DLT7000.

Since the 2/15 libary drives are the only devices on SCSI channels of both the K and L box, I have already tried a power down and power up of the tape library.

I know that this looks like a hardware problem (an HP CE is scheduled to replace the drive tomorrow morning); however, we just had the drive replaced a couple of weeks ago for a different problem.

I guess my question is this: Is there any way to determine what process has device /dev/rmt/c4t4d0BEST busy, and how do can I terminate that process? Also, is there a way to write to Drive 1 outside of OmniBack? HP has asked me to perform a server reboot, but I would like to avoid doing so on our production server.

Thanks in advance for any help!
Michael

[Patrick Wessel · Accepted solution]

Michael,

Try the 'fuser' command to find out which process uses a device-file:
fuser /dev/rmt/c4t4d0BEST

?but I doubt that you find a process that uses the device file.

Did you always try to access the DLT drive using Omniback? Or have you ever tried some 'low-level' commands like tar or dd? Sometimes you are fighting pseudo hardware problems because Omniback does not perform in the expected way

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

You can write using standard unix commands like dd, tar, cpio, pax or using a cat > /dev/rmt/....

There are two commands, mt (magnetic tape) and mc ( media charger) for managent of tapes.


You dont say what kind of SCSI card you have. If you are using the L's internal LVDS card then your driver must be Single ended, and NO diferential.

HTH.

[Michael Francisco]

Thanks for the help...I learned a new UNIX command -- fuser. Turns out that it was a hardware problem.