HPUX 11i support for Sony AIT tape drives

[Integrator]

How do I support Sony AIT on HPUX 11i?

(HP sells AIT-1,2 and 3 media but they do not support AIT-3 on HPUX11i?)

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,

As you point out yourself, there is no support for AIT in HP-UX. There may be a little chance an AIT drive work as unsupported but I don't belive this chance is big. If you don't want to write your own driver you have to use a different drive type.

I think HP sell AIT media because AIT is rather common in Intel platforms.

[David Ruska]

The AIT drives came from pre-merger Compaq, where they were attached to prolient and alpha servers.

[Integrator]

There is support for Sony, AIT-1 in HPUX 10.x.

Is there any plan to support AIT in the later versions of HPUX?

[David Ruska · Accepted solution]

There are no plans to support AIT on HP-UX.

You might be able to get it to work using mksf and creating custom device files with the correct density, but it still wouldn't work with fbackup.

[Bob Ritko]

I know how to get the drives compressing. You have to fool HPUX into thinking they are C1537A, DDS drives. It will NOT be "supported" by HP though. I have some s/w I got from a Sony rep to change the SCSI report string on the drive itself. like I said, contact me to discuss further.
Regards,
leigh