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Re: VXA-2 packet-loader issues and AMANDA [Fwd: hard luck with the new autoloader]
2005-02-04 16:13:23
--On Friday, February 04, 2005 09:41 -0500 "James D. Freels"
<freelsjd AT ornl DOT gov> wrote:
When you say "cabling" issues, does this include a separate scsi card
specific for the
tape drive ? I think my cable connections are good.
This encompasses a whoooole list of issues. The two or three most common,
are cable length, termination, and cable quality. Because you have a
10MB/sec device on there you're limited to 3 meters (~9ft) (FAST SCSI). If
you remove that CD-ROM drive you should have a fully LVD chain from the
sounds of it which means you have up to 12 meters (~40ft). You also need
to have LVD compatible active terminators in either case. Cheap passive
terminators will likely not work at extreme cable lengths. And this length
is *ALL* cabling, so it includes cabling internal to the VXA autoloader (I
think about 1 meter, tops).
I would try cabling the Exa to a dedicated SCSI port before trying to do
any firmware updates. See if that clears up your problems, it really does
sound like your SCSI bus is too long.
The scsi card I have is a "LSI Logic / Symbios Logic (formerly NCR)
53c875 (rev 04)"
All devices are indicating on boot up (dmesg) at 40 MB/s except the
CD-Rom which
is indicating 10 MB/s. I have 3 hard drives, 2 tape drives (including
the new one
having trouble), and 1 CD-Rom in this scsi chain. I have tried all three
scsi drivers
available for this card in the linux kernel 1) ncr53c8xx, 2) sym53c8xx,
and 3) sym53c8xx-2.
The ncr53c8xx driver seems to give the least problems, so I have
concentrated on
this one. As I said, the "library" (autoloader) seems to work correctly,
but it
is just the tape writing that is giving me problems at present. It is
able to label the tapes,
but not write a larger data set to the tape.
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