Proliant DL 380 G4 and Internal Dat 40/80 Tape Drive

[Fayez]

Hi all,
I installed RH AS4 on our DL-380 server, after that I installed PSP v7.3, but our server did not recognize the tape drive.

So can any body help me in this?????

Thanks for all...

[Gopi Sekar]

is it external or internal tape? if it is external tape, then you need to restart the server and keep the tape on while the kernel is booting then only linux will recognize it.

another reason could be that st driver is not loaded, try loding it manually and see whether it works.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Fayez]

Hi,

My tape drive internal not external,
And another thing, how can I load the st driver manually???

Thanks.....

[Gopi Sekar]

try 'lsmod' as root user it should list currently loaded kernel modules, see whether 'st' is listed in it. if not load it using 'modprobe st' see whether it throws any error message.

if any error appears paste it here along with the output of 'dmesg' command

Regards,
Gopi

[Fayez]

Hi,

I issued the command
#lsmod

The st driver was already loaded by the system, but the used value was 0.

And I checked the /dev/st files, there was no such files, checked the file /proc/scsi/scsi and it was empty, cehcked /dev/cciss directory there was files only for my hard drives..

Please find out the attached file for dmesg command.

[Stuart Browne]

Read this. Do what it says.

[Gopi Sekar]

From your dmesg output:

Vendor: HP Model: C5683A Rev: P306

Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03

st: Version 20040403, fixed bufsize 32768, s/g segs 256

Attached scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

st0: try direct i/o: yes (alignment 512 B), max page reachable by HBA 4294967295

cciss0: SCSI subsystem already engaged.


It shows that tape device is detected and is reachable by /dev/st0. you should be having mt package installed in order to access the tape device. If the package is not installed, install it from your distribution CD and try to access the tape device like : 'mt -f /dev/st0 rewind'

the above command will try to rewind the tape cassette if it is available, see whether it is working fine or paste the error output here.

One more noticed from your dmesg output is you have selinux enabled in your system. Try disabling it. Two ways to disable:
1) From xwindows, run 'system-config-securitylevel' and select 'Disable SELinux'. If system-config-* not exists then try rh-config-* or redhat-config* , you can also access this from System Settings menu

2) edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux and set 'SELINUX=disabled'

Remember you have to reboot your system for these changes to take effect. After the reboot try accessing your tape device by /dev/st0 and see whether it works.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Fayez]

Hi all,

Gopi, the problem as you can see from dmesg output, that the system said st at scsi channel 0 ID 0, but the tape installed at scsi channel 2 with ID 4(this is from Array bios at starting).

and belive me there is no /dev/st* files at all, and the mt packeg has been installed.

About Stuart response, there is lots of things, I don't know from where I should start, the /dev/cciss directory already containing points for my disks as follows:

/dev/cciss/c0d0
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2

/dev/cciss/c1d1
/dev/cciss/c1d1p1

[Fayez]

Sory about :
/dev/cciss/c1d1
/dev/cciss/c1d1p1

it is :
/dev/cciss/c0d1
/dev/cciss/c0d1p1

[Gopi Sekar]

Try creating the /dev/st0 as follows:

'mknod /dev/st0 c 9 0'

you need to run this as root, after creation of the file reboot system (just to start off freshly), try accessing the tape using 'mt -f /dev/st0 rewind' and see whether it succeeds.

You can try disabling selinux also.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Matt Palmer_2]

Hi,

I had this problem with a Smart Array Controller that I was connecting my tape drive to. It has something to do with the cciss driver. If at boot time the POST test detects the drive, then its probably the cciss driver.

You need to make the card that the drive is connected to a 'normal' SCSI card and disable the ROC on the card. (please note this is only suitable if the SCSI card is connected solely to the tape drive and you are not using any of the channels for drive access/RAID.

you can either find more info at http://www.cpqlinux.com, read the Docs in /usr/src/linux/Docs/cciss.txt which will describe what I detail below:

or try to rebuild kernel using menuconfig, and check that the Smart Array and SCSI sections are enable or at least enabled as modules.

then try this, once it was successful I created an init script to re-engage the scsi after the machine has booted.

#!/bin/sh

for x in /proc/driver/cciss/cciss[0-9]*
do
echo "engage scsi" > $x
done

echo "rescan" > /proc/scsi/cciss/0 1
echo scsi add-single-device 0 1 3 0 > /proc/scsi/scsi


the first part of the script probes the scsi again to see what is connected.

the rescan and add-single-device describes what PTL/bus/LUN the tape drive is on.

you should now be able to

tar tvf /dev/st0,etc

HTH

regards

Matt

[Fayez]

Hi again,

After disabling ESLinux, I did the following:

1) I removed the tape drive, reinsert it again.
2) Issued the command:
#echo "rescan">/proc/scsi/cciss/0
#dmesg
The output of last command gived me:
The sequential device has been removed
The sequential device has been added c0b0t0l0
So my system can recognize tape drive, but the problem is it did not create the node files (/dev/st*)
So I did the next step:
3) #echo SCSI add-single-device 0 0 0 0>/proc/scsi/scsi
And again it did not work
4) So I issued:
#mknod /dev/st0 c 9 0
#mt -f /dev/st0
The output from mt command:
No such device or address
Linux system must add these nodes files automatically; if there is some thing I had to do with my cciss driver or the kernel???
And how?????

Thanks again for all......

The Smart Array controller is 6i model,
With 2 disks installed on port 0,1
And the tape HP Dat40/80 drive on port 4.