RHEL 6 hpsa errors

[Brandt lawson_1]

I posted this a week ago on the Tape Libraries and Drives forum and didn't get much response. I did get confirmation that the messages are valid scsi responses but I am still having the problem:

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I am bringing up a DL380 G7 server with RHEL 6.1, 64 bit. I have an external SAS LTO-5 (HP 3000) drive connected through a P212 controller. I use NetBackup 7.1 to manage tape backups and it performs as expected. However, whenever the drive is accessed, I get messages logged in my /var/log/messages file like this:

Aug  2 07:31:26 advlsrv kernel: hpsa 0000:0b:00.0: cp ffff880037870000 has check condition: unknown type: Sense: 0x5, ASC: 0x24, ASCQ: 0x0, Returning result: 0x2, cmd=[1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00]

The first digits in the "cmd=" string vary a bit, but otherwise the message is always the same. I can cause these with a simple "mt -f /dev/st0 status" command when the NetBackup daemons are running, I get about four a minute. I am sure that NBU is tickling the drive regularly.

I logged a case with Symantec (NetBackup) and they told me it was a SCSI sense error and a hardware problem. I logged a case with Red Hat and they told me the same thing - talk to your hardware vendor.

I am running the latest firmware in the P212 and the tape drive and I am up to date on my Red Hat installation.

I have Googled the heck out of this with sparse results. Any ideas about what is going on?

[Matti_Kurkela]

You need the SCSI sense code tables to decipher this. Fortunately, they are available on Wikipedia.

You have Sense Key 5, Alternate Sense Code (ASC) 0x24, ASC Qualifier 0.

The table on Wikipedia describes Sense Key 5 as a "Illegal Request" error, and the ASC identifies the reason as "invalid field in Command Descriptor Block". So the drive did not like the command the system sent to it.

The "cmd=" string is most likely the SCSI command that caused the error response. According to the table of SCSI commands on Wikipedia, the command that begins with 0x1d is "SEND DIAGNOSTIC" and the zeroes after that apparently mean it requests old vendor-specific SCSI-1 diagnostics. Perhaps a modern LTO-5 drive would support only standard SCSI-2 diagnostics?

Anyway, I seem to recall that HP recommends not connecting the LTO tape drives to SmartArray controllers. Perhaps you've discovered one of the reasons to that recommendation. The SmartArrays are not straight SCSI/SAS: they are hardware RAID controllers, and as such, they are rather thoroughly disk-oriented. They apparently have a pass-through facility, but it might be designed for the purposes of diagnosing questionable disks and/or applying disk firmware updates, not for heavy-duty data transfer as would be required with a LTO drive.