Hello Ken
I'v struggeled with that problem for months. I have a case with Dell's
Goldsupport and RedHat. I'm running Networker 7.1.3 on a Dell Power Edge
2800 with a Dell PV136T library with 6 LTO-2 tapedrives. OS is RHEL ES 3
v. u3. SCSI-adapters are Adaptec 2860D. I'v found out that the problem
is the aic7xxx driver that come's with redhat. It's a very old version
(6.2.36). I'v mannaged to instal a newer driver (6.3.9) from adaptec and
the only messages(error) I now get in /var/log/messages is a warning:
kernel: st4: Failed to read 65536 byte block with 32768 byte read.
All my backup run's ok, and I'm able to restore from all my tapes. 
Yesterday I installed RHEL ES v 4 (just released) and hoped that the
aic7xxx driver had been replaced. But no, it's still version 6.2.36. I'm
looking forward to get a new rpm/driver from RedHat/Dell that solve the
problem.
Nb. If you look at the version  history from adaptec on the driver
aic7xxx there has been a lot of improvements from 6.2.36 to 6.3.9 so I
simply donn't understand why RedHat is still using the old version.
Regards
Carl Bergmann
Risoe Nat. Lab.
DK



-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Gehring [mailto:kgehring AT MYREALBOX DOT COM] 
Sent: 16. februar 2005 23:18
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Very Frustrating Problem


We are running Networker 6.1.4 (upgraded from 6.1.3 etc) on RedHat AS
3.0 with the latest kernel 2.4.21-27.0.2.ELsmp and we have also tried
the 2.4.29 kernel. The Jukebox is a Storagetek L-80 with 8 SDLT drives
(set up 2 per scsi channel and the picker on its own channel). The scsi
cards are 3 Adaptec 39160 cards (we've also tried Buslogic cards). The
computer is an HP ML370 with 6GB of memory and about 200GB of disk and
dual  2.8GHz processors. We've also tried this with similar Dell
hardware (Dell 4600 configured about the same as the HP).

Now to the problem. We keep getting an inordinate number of scsi bus
resets (varies from 6 to 20 per day). We get tape drives that disappear
(no device present) or get into a state where they are useable but you
can't eject the tape.

We've tried a lot of configuration changes and are now experimenting
with changing the command queueing depth to the tape drives (we've tried
the default of 32 as well as 16, 8 and 4 all with no success).

Has anyone seen this type of problem or behavior? Did you manage to
resolve the problem? How?

Thanks in advance.

Ken Gehring

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