Attaching c6375a DLT7000 to rx6600; possible?

[Matt Hearn]

Hi all! I'm being rushed into a configuration on an rx6600; I have no experience whatsoever with the Itanium series, only PA-RISC, and I've not worked in detail with HPUX 11.23. In order to restore some folks' database, they need me to attach a DLT7000 to the rx6600. I have a C6375A laying around, so I threw it into the rack in a C4318B case.

The problem is, it's FWD. I put an A4800A scsi PCI card into the rx6600, and it doesn't see it, so I did some poking around and found this:

http://docs.hp.com/en/9551/IOcards_PA_IPF.htm

Crud. The A4800A isn't compatible with anything Itanium. Even worse, it doesn't look like ANY FWD cards are!

What are my options? Is there ANY way to attach a C6375A to an rx6600? Do I need an Ultra2 card and some kind of FWD-to-Ultra2 adapter? Or do I need to try and get some kind of Fiber or Ultra2 compatible DLT7000 shipped to me in time for the customer to start their restore on Monday morning?

Thanks!!!

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Absolutely no HVD scsi devices are supported at 11.23 and up. That doesn't mean that you can't use your DLT drive but it does mean that you need to use "some kind of FWD-toUltra2 adapter". That "same kind ..." is called an LVD to HVD SCSI Converter.

Here are a couple of sources:

http://www.paralan.com/mh32.html

http://www.blackbox.com/Catalog/Detail.aspx?cid=308,1559,1566&mid=3202

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Options: get a new, supported scsi card.

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

A supported SCSI card isn't going to help because you absolutely, positively cannot mix and match any HVD and LVD devices on the same bus --- including terminators. If you must use a DLT7000 then you are either going to have to find a SE or LVD version of that drive ---- and almost all DLT7000's are HVD devices or you are going to have to use an LVD/HVD SCSI bus converter. The converter looks just like a piece of wire to both ends of the bus and does not use a SCSI ID.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Do a search for "paralan" on eBay. I found a couple of these almost instanly that are rather cheap.

[Torsten.]

OK, your problem is to get the data out of the tapes. This will be a big problem in the future anyway.

Do you know the data format?
Maybe you can try to install the FWD card to a PC running an OS that can handle the card and the data format and get it on the disk.

AFAIR there were SE-SCSI compatible DLT7000 drives too, but not sure about this (long time ago).

I'm quite sure a DLT8000 drive can read a DLT7000 tape. Such drives were delivered with LVD SCSI interface too.

[Matt Hearn]

What I ended up having to do was attach the DLT7000 to a handy rp7410 running 11.11. In order to restore the data, I'm going to NFS mount the filesystems from the rx6600 to the rp7410 and write directly to them that way.

Now if I can figure out how to read the tapes....

Thanks, all!