gcd@einstein.bgsu.edu (Comer Duncan) (11/05/89)
We have an Exabyte and are trying to get it integrated with our Sun4/260 and are having troubles. I am hoping that some of you have a configuration similar to ours and can give us a few suggestions as to what might be the problem. Here is the situation. We purchased an Exabyte from Software Associates/CITA who got it from Artecon. Let me describe our system and how we have tried to connect the Exabyte. Our system is a Sun4/260 with 16Mb (8 from Sun, 8 from Helios) and a cartridge tape and SCSI host adaptor from Sun. The system has a color monitor. For disk we have a CDC Imprimis, which is a SMD with Xylogic 753 controller. All works just fine until we try to connect up the Exabyte. The idea was to buy an internal cable to connect to the existing SCSI host adaptor which drives the cartridge tape. Artecon claims to have done this for 'several' systems and told CITA it works just fine. We can not seem to verify this good behavior... First, we connected the Artecon internal cable to the Emulex-202 per instructions with one end connected to the cartridge tape and the other end going out of the left side of the Emulex to a face plate containing a 50-pin conncector. The external cable from the back of the Sun then goes to the Exabyte. We configured things so that the cartridge is st0 and the Exabyte is st1 and of course did a MAKEDEV st1. Whenever we try to use the Exabyte nothing happens. Even worse, the cartridge tape drive does not function. In fact the external red light on the cartridge tape drive is lit EVEN when no tape is in the cartridge drive...Not good. After entirely too much time spent talking to support people about this we were told to try disconnecting the cartridge tape from the loop and connecting up the internal cable so that only the Exabyte was at the end of the line. We did this and set the address to st0 on the Exabyte but still no success. I should have mentioned that we have unterminated the Emulex since the Exabyte was to be the last device. The Exabyte is terminated. Actually we have tried unterminating the Emulex and see no difference in result. Given that the kernel has the right drivers (we are running 4.0 with the Artecon-supplied drivers), what gives?? I am hoping that some of you have the same situation and that you had success with this and can give some advice. We are not novices and have given this far more work that we ever expected. We are not pleased with the quality of the support and documentation but do want to point out that CITA and lately Artecon have worked hard to figure out what is going on. It is just that they have not been able to tell us what is wrong.... Please respond to me directly. If there is enough information of general interest I will gladly summarize for sun-spots. Comer Duncan Department of Physics and Astronomy Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43403 gcd@einstein.bgsu.edu
se@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Steve Elliott) (10/08/90)
I've just had a very strange error message while trying to restore a file from 8mm tape. The error was: unknown file mode: 00 I used the dump command to create the tape; I was doing an interactive restore when the error occurred? Does anyone know what causes this error? Is there any way to get around it? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Steve Elliott se@uk.ac.lancs.comp
davee@mitre.org (Dave Edwards) (10/08/90)
I am having some interesting problems with an Exabyte drive on a Sun
4/490. When we try an "mt -f /dev/rst0 erase" the device goes out to
never- never land! I see on the mt man page that not all operations are
supported for all devices. Is this a bad combination? After trying it, I
can't get the drive to give back my tape cartridge for some time (hour or
more)! Any clues will be gratefully appreciated.
- Dave Edwards
davee@mitre.org