In message <01HKKLP9201U9JEFW7 AT SARA DOT NL> you write:
> All of our 8mm tape drives on all of our RS/6000s are defined as
> /dev/rmt0.  The ADSM Administrator' Reference (page 96), referring
> to the DEFINE DRIVE command says "For 8mm tape drives, you must
> specify the device name having the form /dev/mtX....  DO NOT enter
> a device name that has the form /dev/rmtX."  Is there a secret way
> to get AIX to define an 8mm drive as "mt" instead of "rmt"?
>
> The ADSM Administrator's Guide (page 161) tells how to configure a
> standalone SCSI tape drive.  It simply describes the standard way
> we have defined all our 8mm drives.  And, of course, they end up
> defines as "rmt".
>
> When I issue the command:
>     define drive manlib tapedrive1 device=/dev/mt0
> or: define drive manlib tapedrive1 device=/dev/rmt0
> I get the same error:
> ANR8420E DEFINE DRIVE: An I/O error occurred while accessing drive TAPE
> DRIVE1.
>
> There must be a simple answer to this?


There is, I ran into the same problem a little while ago. I thought I could
fix it by defining an mt device by hand, using mknod, but that was not the
trick.
By accident I was playing around in SMIT and suddenly I discovered that I had
created some mt devices ..... guess what, you have to set the blocksize to
1024. We always set it to 0 (variable blocksize), which appears to only create
rmt devices !

..Victor


Victor Marchand                                phone : +31 20 5923000
AIX project leader.                            fax   : +31 20 6683167
SARA (Academic Computing Services Amsterdam)   email marchand AT sara DOT nl
PO Box 4613 1009 AP Amsterdam
or
Kruislaan 415 , 1098 SJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands