Compaq Proliant DL360 Quantum DLT4000 Tape Drive

[Alex Zbyslaw]

RA Cohen wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>I'm re-posting and re-framing this problem somewhat...
>
>I'm running several Compaq Proliant DL360 servers, all with FBSD
>6.0-RELEASE.
>
>One of these has an internal Quantum DLT 4000 (that's how the
>BIOS identifies it -- I am seeing the drive ID'd by the BIOS as
>the machine boots) tape drive. I need to use it, but can find
>no evidence of this hardware in the dmesg output. I've googled
>around and really all I can locate are references to CAM, the
>aacp driver compiled in the kernel, and device.hints. Can
>someone put this all together for me? I'm not a newbie, have
>compiled many kernels and worlds, and have been a FBSD user for
>several years.
>  
>
You're starting to sound a little desperate!  If you don't receive any 
better informed responses, then maybe this will help.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about Compaq Proliant DL360 servers, and hope 
fervently never to be associated with anything that has Compaq in it's name.

Since the IDA hardware that this tape drive is attached to is basically 
some kind of RAID, perhaps either it, or it's FreeBSD driver simply does 
not support tape drives.

The ida0 message in your dmesg, certainly says 0 drives, whereas ida1 is 
reporting 2 logical drives.  That, to me, means that either the card or 
the driver is just not seeing the tape drive, and it's possible that no 
hint or kernel option will change that.

When you say that the tape is reported by the BIOS, I assume that this 
is a BIOS specifically for the IDA controller.  If not, and it has a 
BIOS you can do things in, then have a look in there.  This is probably 
what you've done already... But if there are any config options, play 
with them.

If that fails, the there are two more things to try:

    1) Look through the source code and see if you can find any 
reference to the driver recognising tape drives.  This might not be easy :-(

    2) Email the authors of the ida drivers and see if the driver does 
support tapes.  The man page on 5.4 talks a lot about disks and not at 
all about tapes, but that might be misleading.

If both of those fail, then you may need to get an add on, bog standard 
SCSI card that's supported by FreeBSD.  Something like the cheapest 
Adaptec which will drive the tape at full speed.

--Alex

PS I assume there's nothing obvious like termination causing the problem.

PPS A quick google for "freebsd ida tape drive" did have two relevant 
hits (the first two) but they didn't help me much since the 
conversations seemed to start half way through.  However, one is from 
one of the driver developers, and does suggest a cheap Adaptec card :-)