HP Ultrium 1840 SAS + HP P212 HBA

[Beckz]

I've tried to setup a tape drive (1840 SAS) with a P212 HBA controller on different Linux boxes. Finally I tried a supported OS, Red Hat ES v.5+ but still facing the same problem:

The P212 HBA turns up as a valid PCI controller using "lspci":

"20:00.0 RAID bus controller: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers (rev 01)"

But when I try to list valid SCSI drives i.e. "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" attached to the system, there is nothing but my hard drives and CD/DVD showing.

Any ideas someone?

Thanks,
Beck

[Curtis Ballard]

Make certain the HBA is at the latest firmware and that you are using the HP driver instead of the standard Linux driver.

When the system boots does the HBA show the tape drive? It should show "Tape or CD-ROM at . . . "

[Beckz]

Curtis,

I've updated the HBA driver with:

"Smart Update Firmware DVD"

The tape drive is present at HBA boot time on:

"Port 2E Bay 5 Box 0"

However, the tape drive can't be found (or isn't listed) by the /proc/scsi/ subsystem. This is what I see:

Host: scsi3 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 Vendor: ATA Model: WDC WD5000AADS-0
Rev: 01.0 Type: Direct-Access
ANSI SCSI revision: 05

Host: scsi4 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: ATA Model: WDC WD1500HLFS-0
Rev: 04.0 Type: Direct-Access
ANSI SCSI revision: 05

Host: scsi5 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: ATA Model: ST3250410AS
Rev: 3.AH Type: Direct-Access
ANSI SCSI revision: 05

Host: scsi6 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: TSSTcorp Model: CDDVDW TS-H653Z Rev: HD00 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 05

Host: scsi7 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: TSSTcorp Model: CDDVDW TS-H653Z Rev: HD00 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 05

Any other ideas?

Thanks!
Beck

[Beckz]

I ran L&TT and this is the devices found:

Other Devices:
1 ATA WDC WD5000AADS-0 (Address: 30.0.0[3-/dev/sg0])
2 ATA WDC WD1500HLFS-0 (Address: 40.0.0[4-/dev/sg1])
3 ATA ST3250410AS (Address: 50.0.0[5-/dev/sg2])

[Curtis Ballard]

We have a lot of those controllers running with RH 5.4.

The driver I have people use here is the RPM - I don't think the firmware update CD installs the latest driver. The latest driver file is: cpq_cciss-3.6.22-8.rhel5.i686.rpm

I just checked the support site for that controller and if I select RH 5 and 32 bit under Driver it only offers that file.

Here is one link to it for Red Hat 5 32 bit:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3885791&prodNameId=3890396&swEnvOID=4006&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-4af0edd8c18644a9aa6af07a48

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello Beck,

do you have a ProLiant server or did you install the controller into a non-HP server model?

Regards,
Patrick

[Beckz]

I run a 64-bit RedHat server on HP hardware (Workstation xw6600). Regarding the driver, shouldn't the tape drive be detected and listed by the /proc/scsi subsystem regardless of what driver I then use to operate it?

[Curtis Ballard]

Note that the controller is not currently supported on the workstations although I can't think of any reason it wouldn't work.

The correct driver is critical when using tape. The legacy Smart Array driver doesn't support tape and many changes were made to the drivers (and the HBA firmware) to support tape and tape library devices. Because the Smart Array controllers aren't simple SCSI HBA's they only present devices to the OS that are supported devices and tape drives or tape libraries will not be present unless the driver understands how to talk to them.