Proliant DL 380 hot-plug tape drive with SUSE Linux

[Dale McPherson_1]

We were able to get DL-380 hot plug tape drive working with RedHat 8 distro, using "enage scisi" info in cciss.txt document.
We recently upgraded server to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Version 9, and can't access the tape drive even though we're using the same scsi engage command.

Running dmseg provides following output:
cciss0: No device changes detected.
cciss0: No appropriate SCSI device detected, SCSI subsystem not engaged.

The hot-plug AIT tape drive still shows a power light and will accept or eject tapes.

[Stuart Browne]

I unfortunately don't have access to a SUSE machine, but my guess would be that the kernel setting called 'CONFIG_CISS_SCSI_TAPE' is not set.

This setting tells the driver/kernel that the RAID controller is capable of taking a hot-plug tape drive.

On RH machines, this is enabled by default. I don't know about SUSE machines.

Without the kernel's ".config" file, I'm unsure how to test whether this setting is on or off however.

[Dale McPherson_1]

I generated a config file readout with:
zcat /proc/config.gz > config.txt and the
CONFIG_CISS_SCSI_TAPE parameter was set to 'Y'.

Is that is a valid way of finding the kernel configuration?

[Stuart Browne]

It's not a method I was aware of, and can't find an equivlanet on any of my redhat or fedora boxes, so do not know.

[Dale McPherson_1]

Thanks for the rescue attempt.

On a hunch, I ejected the tape which we had used with a previous Linux version, rebooted the server and inserted a fresh tape (AIT-100). When I tried a typical command (mt -f /dev/st0 status), the tape showed. I then TAR'd and restored a directory, and everything went swimmingly. Since I a relative newbie at Linux, it was very satisfying, because this tape backup issue has frustrated our program to bring up a bunch of Linux servers. Thanks again