dougw@fdls.UUCP (dougw) (02/22/90)
During January, I had written: We have an NCR Tower 32/650 with NCR Unix 02.01.01. When I use the NCR System Administrator (sa) menus to do a PARTITION BACKUP to an internal 150 cartridge tape drive in the bottom tape slot, the drive light stays on . . . Several others posted to the net or sent me email that they had experienced the same problem. And, Sam Vause posted the following: Please contact your NCR Customer Support Center . . . and request the "Tape Drive Light Patch" ... Diane Vandaveer in the NCR Customer Support Center was aware of the problem but was unaware of a "Tape Drive Light Patch". I quoted her Sam's suggestion, and she said she would look into it and get back to me. A week later, she telephoned that she had the patch and was sending it to me. When it was received, there was a 2 page disclaimer letter from the Customer Support Service Center Manager that this patch had not yet been cleared by NCR Quality Assurance and to use it at our own risk. Being a glutton for punishment, I installed the patch which replaces a kernel module and then relinks the kernel. Then, I performed a PARTITION BACKUP through the NCR System Administrator (sa) menus and the tape drive light unfortunately was not turned off. As before, I had to do a COMPLETE SYSTEM SHUTDOWN to get the tape drive light to turn off. When I reported this to Diane Vandaveer, she talked to whomever she had contacted to get the patch, and they insisted it "WORKED FOR THEM". Then, she dialed into our system and discovered we are "non standard" in a few areas. (specifically, our root partition is on device sda1 which is a 610 mb (formatted) hard disk driven by a SCSI board. We also have 2 stock NCR 120 mb drives driven by NCR's Mass Storage Controller. The comment was something like "I didn't even know you could do that . . .!". Anyway, we rapidly became unsupported and no further action has been taken by NCR Customer Support on our problem. It appears what is needed now is another user with this same problem but with a "stock" NCR system who is willing to install the patch (could be read as "another glutton for punishment"). To date, we are the only customer site who has installed this patch through the NCR Customer Support Center (in San Diego). I have discussed this approach with Diane Vandaveer, and she is very willing to do this. Just contact "CODAR" and request the "Tape Light Drive Patch". I would also suggest you ask that they broadcast your incident to Diane Vandaveer and reference our outstanding incident number which is 00122496. As an aside, any takers should make sure that the last make of their kernel was done under the name 'config'. Why? Because that is the name the patch installation uses and takes all the kernel configuration parameters from there. This created all sorts of fun and games for us since we had last manually relinked using the name 'test' as recommended in the NCR Tower Performance Tuning Tutorial. Now that we know this, we have converted to using the name 'config' for manual kernel relinking. It is suggested this fact be included in the installation instructions for all patches where an automatic kernel relink is done. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Doug Walker | email: uunet!fdls!dougw | Oregon Department of Agriculture | Tel: (503) 378-3790 | Food and Dairy Division | Fax: (503) 378-5529 | 635 Capitol Street NE | | Salem, OR 97310-0110 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------