TapeAlert on C1533A does not seem to be ANSI Compliant (advanced question)

[CA827449]

I have a SureStore DAT8 running latest firmware, and am doing low-level SCSI commands relating to the TapeAlert feature.

The SCSI spec says I should be able to set the Test bit on mode page 0x1C, with Report count = 7fff, and MRIE=0 to set all the supported tape alert flags.

(I.e., send 1C 0A 0C 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 7f ff) with ModeSelect(6) command.)

I get a sense code error indicating Key=2 ASC=5 ASQ=26h.

After examining the changeable bits on same mode page, the last 2 bytes of the report count field are set=0, indicating that they are not changeable. (This violates the SPC-3 ANSI spec also. I should be able to set the TapeAlert flags to determine the devices' capabilities.)

Just for grins, I then masked out the Modeselect packet with the changeable bits, and still got the 2/5/26 error.

Note also that Log page 2E exists, as well as Mode page 1C, which indicates the tape supports TapeAlert functionality.

(Other vendor tape drives work fine when configuring and querying TapeAlert pages. Is there some undocumented trick to get this feature to work right?)

So my questions are:
1) How do I programmatically determine the supported TapeAlert flags for a given device?
2) How do I programmatically invoke the TapeAlert TEST feature to generate false errors?