Hot plug DAT40 and RHEL4U3

[Michael Steigman]

Hi all,

Just setting up a new DL385 and have noticed that the tape device is not recognized by RHEL. Although I don't usually install the HP support packs on my HP Linux boxes, I did in this case, just to see if their version of the cciss driver behaved the same and it does.

I've come across a couple of threads out there that recommend echoing "engage scsi" then "rescan" into the /proc/drivers/cciss/cciss0 and that does set up the tape device but also spits:

ERROR: SCSI host `cciss' has no error handling
ERROR: This is not a safe way to run your SCSI host
ERROR: The error handling must be added to this driver

into the system log. Additionally, after doing this, the driver apparently offlined the drive anyhow while I was running amtapetype (from the Amanda backup system) to determine settings for the drive:

May 24 18:56:38 serverx kernel: cciss: cp 0000010037dc57a8 timedout
May 24 18:56:38 serverx kernel: scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0
May 24 18:57:08 serverx kernel: scsi0 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device


I haven't found much info out there and there is nothing in the support documents for the DL385 related to this. Has anyone run into this or seen info relating to the issue?

TIA

[Alan_152]

What kind of tape device is it, and how is it hooked up?

I'd say, off hand, that you need to download the latest drivers for your HBA or scsi device from HP.com...

[Michael Steigman]

Thanks for the response. I installed the latest support pack from HP, which includes the newest software. Made no difference.

The drive is pluggable so it hangs off the 6i array controller. The model number is Q1546 FWIW.

[Alan_152]

So, you are definitely on driver 2.6.10-13 (4/13/06) and firmware 2.58A (10/7/05)? Are you also using the current ACU CLI (7.50-18, 4/13/06) to configure the array while live?

[Alan_152]

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/support/files/storage/us/locate/1116_6050.html

[Michael Steigman]

Ah... you know, I guess I missed this in the Proliant Support Pack install (which includes the latest cciss driver) but the rpm installation failed for the cciss driver - the kernel version with Update 3 of RHEL is 2.6.9-34.x.x.EL and the driver only supports 2.6.9-5/11/22. Yikes! I wonder if I could force the install?

I have not toyed around with the CLI but it is installed. I configured the array with Smartstart.

PS - Also, I'm running the AMD64 version of RHEL.

[Michael Steigman]

Just following up, I decided to try installing the kernel from Update 2 so I could try to install the cpq_cciss rpm package. After installing the old kernel, I was able to install the cpq_cciss package and upon reboot, the drive was recognized and the tape device set up.

I guess my only question at this point is how often will the be driver updated? It's a bit dissappointing that I had to install a 6 month old kernel in order to get HP's software working correctly (I haven't even gone back to see whether this particular kernel has any known vulnerabilities, which is likely).

Thanks.