Installation of a SCSI DAT drive in Fedora Core 3

njp353 · 03-02-2005, 05:13 PM

Any help on installing a SCSI DAT tape drive in Fedora Core 3?
My adaptec controller card shows up in the Hardware Browser.
What commands can I use to detech the device? or what drivers and/or packages do I need to install to utilize a DAT drive. Not sure what brand the drive is, but it is an internal 4mm DAT. (I have very little or no Linux experience, mostly AIX). In AIX it would be showin up as /dev/rmt0 or /dev/rmt1.

Is there an command in Linux for system backups like a mksysb in AIX?

Thanks for any help in advance.

rnturn · 03-02-2005, 10:34 PM

You ought to see the SCSI tape device as "st0" (or "nsto"). Check the file /var/log/dmesg for an indication that the kernel is seeing the tape device connected to the bus adapter. If not, that's the first problem to overcome.

Another thing to watch out for -- at least it burned me in the 2.4 kernels -- was the DDS devices had to be initialized with "stinit" before you could use them reliably. And you couldn't have a tape loaded when stinit was run. I used to insert a call to a homegrown script into rc.sysinit (if memory serves) that forced a "mt -f 'tapedev' rewoffl" to eject any loaded cartridges and then ran stinit on the detected tape device.

Caveat: I'm not a FC user (SuSE) nor a DDS user any more (DLT) so YMMV.

As for backups, there are several tools you could use: tar, cpio, amanda (a bit more complex than you might need, IMHO), and some others. Red Hat used to (at least in 8.0) include the venerable, old "dump" program. It seems to be going by the wayside, though. SuSE didn't include it in 9.2. Not sure about FC.

Hope this helps...

--
Rick

njp353 · 03-02-2005, 10:55 PM

no device showing in the /var/log/dmesg file, but the SCSI controller does show up

scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36
<Adaptec 2940 Ultra SCSI adapter>
aic7880: Ultra Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 16/253 SCBs

what can I do to detect the drive? I will check the connections next.

njp353 · 03-03-2005, 09:23 AM

The drive was not connected to the controller.
I got it working now, thanks for the help.

rnturn · 03-03-2005, 09:07 PM

Quote:

The drive was not connected to the controller.

I was going to suggest carefully watching the console as the system boots. You ought to see the connected devices (though you might miss it is there's only a single device and you blink. :-)) Or you could jump into the 2940 card's onboard diagnostics/setup by pressing Ctrl-A when the Adaptec banner is displayed and go into the SCSI utilities menu option. That'll rescan the bus and show you the attached devices. If you don't see something, check the cabling.

If the tape device is the only thing or the last device on the bus, be sure and have the onboard termination enabled to avoid weird and frustrating problems later on. Ah, but your an AIX guy so you probably already know that.

--
Rick