System Crashes

[Ayman Altounji]

Apologies if this is a known problem by everyone except me but I had a terrible time finding this info. If you are using any Compaq badged Sony DAT drive with UnixWare and you are finding the system crashes when issuing a re-tensioning commend (present in the emergency recovery commands) then this may be the answer.
According to Compaq : The Sony DAT drives take an extremely long time to perform certain commands (e.g. retensioning) and as such may crash the system (crazy buit true).
To overcome this problem either buy a different DAT drive (extreme and expensive) or make the following change (this is for a DAT drive commented via an integrated SMART array):
Edit the file /etc/conf/pack.d/ida/space.c and change the value of ida_timeout from 60 to 300
Rebuild the kernel and reboot.
Hope this helps someone.