On Thursday, Dec 4, 2003, at 13:26 Australia/Sydney, Richard Sims wrote:

...

Dec  3 21:10:17 twcsds001       Parity Error
Dec  3 21:10:17 twcsds001 scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING:
           /sbus@b,0/QLGC,isp@0,10000 (isp2):

We have replaced all the Ultra SCSI III (sbus) cards. These are the
latest
cards Sun has out. We have upgraded IBMtape, the library code and the
tape
drive microcode. The IBM CE's can exercise the drives without any
problems but
we can't open the drives with tapeutil. We are at loss what to try
next. Any
suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Linda - Your added info, particularly about tapeutil not working,
jogged some
        memories of postings from about four years ago.  Rummaging
around in my
QuickFacts, I dredged up:

"... Or it could be that the same device is defined as being accessed
by
 multiple device drivers: you run happily for weeks, and then some
other
 facility goes to access the device, which causes the other device
driver to be
 loaded which supplants yours."

I'm wondering now if that's what's happening.  I'm not a Solaris guy:
perhaps
there's one out there who could lend more.  Possibly, incidental OS
maintenance
work by your Solaris people is inciting the problem, or happenstance
use of a
seemingly unrelated tape drive in that same system.

One thing I came upon in researching this which may or may not help:
In the  IBM Ultrium Device Drivers: Installation and User's Guide
manual,
in the  Solaris Device Driver (IBMtape)  chapter, Special Files
section,
there is a description of a "...device hierarchy established to
support I/O for
an IBM SCSI tape subsystem".  This may help validate what actually has
control
at the moment.

Wish I could help more definitively,   Richard Sims, BU

From personal experience, this can definitely be the case. Double check
your SCSI device driver configurations - at our site, the Solaris 'st'
driver is configured to attach SCSI IDs 8-15, and the IBMtape SCSI IDs
0-6. This works quite nicely for our purposes.

Cheers,
--
Paul Ripke
Unix/OpenVMS/TSM/DBA
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