Adding external tape & hard drive

[Robert Egoroff]

I have just taken the admin responsibilities on an old HP9000 system running HP-UX 9.0. We plan to upgrade this platform in the near future however in the interim I need to,
i)get a tape drive going as the original has failed and,
ii) add an external hard disk to gets some mirroring going!

Soooo with this in mind,

I have added a SONY DDS SDT-s9000 external tape drive and a Seagate external hard drive onto open ended SCSI.

The SAM recognizes both SCSI devices, as does ioscan, however....

i) I get i/o errors on the tape drive. This occurs on fbackup and tar on all device files SAM has bound to this device!

ii) SAM cannot recognize the external hard disk. It suggests adding an entry into /usr/sam/lib/disk_aliases. Unfortunately this file does not exist on my platform and I have not been able to find out what is required to build one.

Does anyone who is far more gifted than I will ever be in UNIX, be able to offer advice on how to resolve these issues??

Regards

[Varghese Mathew]

Hi,

The first problem occurs even before getting the backup/restore operation kicks off, or after a while it kicked off??, if the answer is yes to the first one you need to see whether the correct driver (device file) you are using for the Sony drive, or whether the SCSI card supports the specific device. Or even the HP UX patch level is appropriate to start using the same.

If the error occurs after copying/restoring few files then probably it can be a problem with tapes or may be the drive itself.

The second question you have , i won't be able to give in any answers as i have never used a HP UX 9.X system.

Hope this helps

Cheers !!!
Mathew

[harry d brown jr]

That sony is a DDS-3, which you probably don't have the device drivers installed for it, and the same for the disk. And you might not be able to find them for HPux 9.04, which means you might have to try to buy some old hardware.

I would not try any mirroring or lvm at 9.04, as it was about as stable as any ms product.

The bottom line is that you need to upgrade this beast to at the very least 10.20 (something that your predecessors should have done two plus years ago).

[Robert Egoroff]

Thanks Mathew & Harry,

The Sony Tape Drive has problems with the device drivers I have on the HP-UX platform (as opposed to read/write type errors)

I did go to the SONY web site in attempt in finding a suitable driver but have had no joy. I'll keep searching.

The fact that HP-UX 9.0 does not do a good job on mirroring is of concern. Thanks for drawing my attention to it.

Thanks both for your help.

[Patrick Wessel]

Robert,
there is another thing I would like to point to.
Is there an entry in the /etc/disktab file for your diskdrive?

[harry d brown jr]

Robert, you most likely won't find a device driver from sony for your tape drive. Here is an interesting sniplet:

Check the dip switch setting on the bottom of the tape drive, for a
Sun running Solaris 2.x, they should be 1 & 3 OFF, 2 & 4 ON. This
caught us the first time we used them.

http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2001-February.txt

Also another sniplet:

The Spectra 5000 and Sony SDT-9000 tape drives are supported directly by many 3rd party software applications and host systems. In
situations where the Spectra 5000 or the SDT-9000 are not yet supported, they can be configured to emulate the previous generation
Spectra 4mm library product. The Library can be configured to emulate a Spectra 4000 and the tape drives can be configured to emulate
HP C1533A drives (used in Spectra 4000). This configuration feature will allow the Spectra 5000 to properly function with all software
and host systems that previously supported the Spectra 4000.
NOTE: When connecting to Hewlett Packard HPUX machines the emulation mode will have to be set to Spectra 4000 and the drives
configured to emulate HP C1533A drives to allow compression to be enabled by the HPUX device drivers.

from:
http://www.spectralogic.com/common/collateral/documentation/BullFrog/92840014.pdf

[harry d brown jr]

Robert, Patrick has a good point about the disktab file, what is the model of your seagate drive? Seagate has a good website for most of their products so that you can get the physical configuration information.

[Robert Egoroff]

Wow! Thanks for the response.

I eventually did find some information on configuring the SDT-9000 for UNIX boxes. However it basically states the steps using SAM, rebuild the kernel and rebooting. The sticking point being u must be running UNIX 9.05 or higher. I've got UNIX 9.0!! Using an emulator looks like the way to go. Thanks

Patrick,
Entering the hard disk in /etc/disktab is indeed I good idea. I popped in and had a look, scratched my head, and decided it didn't mean much to me.

If anyone can tell me what to enter, details of the SCSI disk I am using is at,
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/scsi/st31200n.html

Thanks all again!

[Patrick Wessel]

Robert,

During my attempt to write the answer crashed my PC twice. I do not take this as a sign and try it once more.

The disktab is a simple table that describes the geometrical characteristics of the disk drives. For detailed information take a look into the manual page of disktab.
Please find below the entry for the ST31200N that I took from our last HP-UX 9.something box.

Good luck,
Patrick


ST31200N: :ty=winchester:ns#48:nt#13:nc#1646:rm#5400: :s0#24280:b0#8192:f0#1024: :s1#48560:b1#8192:f1#1024: :s2#1027432:b2#8192:f2#1024: :s3#29298:b3#8192:f3#1024: :s4#107426:b4#8192:f4#1024: :s5#685480:b5#8192:f5#1024: :s6#1998:b6#8192:f6#1024: :s7#75504:b7#8192:f7#1024: :s8#822760:b8#8192:f8#1024: :s9#793432:b9#8192:f9#1024: :s10#129024:b10#8192:f10#1024: :s11#951928:b11#8192:f11#1024: :s12#1024936:b12#8192:f12#1024: :s13#976264:b13#8192:f13#1024: :s14#24280:b14#8192:f14#1024: :s15#48560:b15#8192:f15#1024:

[Patrick Wessel]

The forums-software changed the format of the disktab entry. Please find it attached as Word-file

[Robert Egoroff]

Patrick,
Great! Those settings did the job. Thanks for your support.

Regards