Odd behavior after installing a tape drive

[Tim Judd]

I'm no expert on tape drives either, but I was sure that "losing a
SCSI device" is a bad thing for SCSI -- think of it as an IDE drive.
you don't just go pulling power or data from a running, booted
computer.

All the devices in a computer are on, stays on, until the system shuts down.

The PTY/SCSI subject of your email should be unrelated, but a abruptly
missing device is never a positive outcome for an OS.  Think about the
old "removing a mounted USB drive = panic" issue we've dealt with for
years.

I am questioning your reasoning behind turning off a tape drive on a
live system.  I would never recommend that.

On 7/19/09, mahlerrd at yahoo.com <mahlerrd at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> After installing a tape drive and SCSI card in my home system, I got some
> strange behavior that I think isn't directly related, but would like to get
> an expert opinion about.
>
> mobius# uname -a
> FreeBSD mobius 7.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Fri Sep  5 02:34:20
> CDT 2008     rich at mobius:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
>
> On July 7, I turned off the system, installed the SCSI card, connected the
> drive and turned it all back on.  This all got correctly detected as (select
> lines from /var/log/messages):
>
> Jul  7 03:10:40 mobius kernel: asr0: <Adaptec Caching SCSI RAID> mem
> 0xf4000000-0xf5ffffff irq 17 at device 12.1 on pci2
> Jul  7 03:10:40 mobius kernel: asr0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
> Jul  7 03:10:40 mobius kernel: asr0: [ITHREAD]
> Jul  7 03:10:40 mobius kernel: asr0:   ADAPTEC 2100S FW Rev. 370F, 1
> channel, 256 CCBs, Protocol I2O
> Jul  7 03:10:40 mobius kernel: sa0 at asr0 bus 0 target 11 lun 0
> Jul  7 03:10:40 mobius kernel: sa0: <EXABYTE VXA-172 3206> Removable
> Sequential Access SCSI-3 device
>
> I stuck in a tape, did a level 0 dump of /home and tested a restore, both of
> which worked perfectly.
>
> Only July 8, I ejected the tape via the button on the front, and then turned
> off the tape drive so the visiting relatives wouldn't complain about the fan
> noise (more from /var/log/messages):
> Jul  8 02:27:01 mobius kernel: (sa0:asr0:0:11:0): lost device
>
> That next week, I tried to SSH to this box from work to do some minor random
> thing or another, and I got this sort of error message:
> Jul 14 15:27:16 mobius sshd[64290]: error: openpty: Invalid argument
> Jul 14 15:27:16 mobius sshd[64293]: error: session_pty_req: session 0 alloc
> failed
>
> I believe I had SSHed to it at least twice over the preceding week, on July
> 10 and early in the day on July 14.
>
> As the system was running perfectly in all other ways (well, at least the
> wife hadn't complained her network files were offline, which is the only
> important thing!), it took a few days before I finally got around to logging
> in at the console and rebooting it after which it has seemed to be fine.
> The system has been eminently stable other than this one issue one time.
>
> I have not been able to find much from Google about this other than the
> following two items-
>
> A) very specific bugs against different SSH versions than I am using.  Doubt
> this is the problem.
>
> B) some issues some folks have had with needing to create /dev/pty or
> similar items.  While it seems far fetched, this is the first time the
> system was up with a new device and ... I don't know.  New device in the
> system and an old device goes wonky within a week seems to be a bit of a
> coincidence.
>
> ** Does anyone have any thoughts if these are related or not?  **
>
> Also, any tips, tricks or sites with working with tape drives on FreeBSD
> would be appreciated!  (The handbook is a bit sparse on this point and I'm
> used to autoloaders and better under Windows/Backup Exec).  I'm learning my
> way around camcontrol and mt, but should only need such things in certain
> circumstances, like to get the tape drive "back" after turning it off for a
> while, right?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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