How to determine version of DLT8000

[Chaim Budnick]

We have two customers who are merging.

There is a DLT8000 on a VMS V7.3-1 system which needs to be transferred to a VMS V7.1-2 system.

HP told us that as long as the DLT version is equal or lower than 4.0F it is supported by the v7.1-2 system. A 4,0G or higer version is NOT supported for V7.1-2.

How can I easily determine what version this DLT is? SHO DEV/FULL does not show this. I tried ANA/SYS and SHO DEV, but I did not easily see a version.

Thanks,

Chaim

[Bob Blunt · Accepted solution]

Chaim,

Not sure where you got that information. Of course, there are "versions" or "revisions" of the hardware as well as different versions of the firmware for the drive. I can't find anything referring to either a hardware revision of that number or a firmware release with that name.

According to my information, support for the DLT8000 started with V7.1-2 I'd strongly recommend that all patches for that release of OpenVMS be installed. I'd also be cautious when setting the density and compression from the DCL command line and make sure that it's working as expected. However, this class of devices is NOT listed in the OpenVMS SPDs I've checked.

The easiest way to determine some revision and firmware information is to check the errorlog. If an error was logged for this tape device, you should at least be able to get the firmware revision. I'd recommend DECevent for that job. If that doesn't provide what you need, you may have to use one of the unsupported SCSI utilities included with OpenVMS to read the mode pages on the drive itself or use a tape utility tool to get the data.

bob

[Karl Rohwedder]

Try SCSI_INFO from SYS$ETC:

$ pi mcr sys$etc:scsi_info mka200 | more

reveals e.g.

...

$! Vendor Identification : DEC
$!
$! Product Identification: TZ89 (C) DEC
$!
$! Product Revision Level: 1837
$!
... and a lot more ...


Kalle