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Geek Culture / - Help - Tape Drives + Linux

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Nicholas Thompson
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Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 14th Jul 2006 18:30
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Has anyone here used a tape drive in Linux?

I'm running Fedora Core 4 on a Dell 4400 Poweredge (Dual 1Ghz Xeon P3's, 1.5Gb RAM and 7 RAID5 SCSI HD's. This is my work web development machine (OTT isn't it!). As I do all my work on here I'd be severely annoyed if it all dissapeared. It has a Benchmark DLT1 Tape drive in it which can take 40Gb uncompressed and 80Gb compressed tapes.

I've installed the 'mt' command but whenever I do 'mt -f /dev/tape status' It just says "Input / Output Error".

I've tried different tapes.

The system seems to have recognised the drive as when I do 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi I get this:


The CDROM works fine so the card is functioning.

At bootup, I get this message:
Quote: "Jul 14 10:23:33 deviant kernel: st 1:0:6:0: Attached scsi tape st0"


So it definately seems to have found it. The reason I used /dev/tape earlier is that the system has automatically symlinked /dev/tape to the tape drive. It doesn't work if I try to mt the device directly.

I'd seriously appreciate any suggestions here as I'm running out of idea's and I cant believe Fedora Core 4 cant use a very commonly found tape drive!

I've already googled and tried all the stuff I've seen on the net - but it wont work. I just cant get the drive status (let alone load, rewind, etc).

Please help me!!

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indi
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Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Earth, Brisbane, Australia
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 05:12 Edited at: 15th Jul 2006 05:13
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this manual is for sun machines, however it does go into depth about maintenance of tapes,
sometimes tapes just die or act very strange..

silly question but its not write protected is it?
have you tried a different tape?
can you mount the tape drive on another machine to validate its working?
is there a firmware upgrade on the manufacturers site?

this is the link to that manual.
http://www.compsci.wm.edu/SciClone/documentation/hardware/Sun/L9/L9DriveManual.pdf

does the drive read using a bootlinux disc like ubuntu etc.?

can you get a diskusage off the tap with du etc.?

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Nicholas Thompson
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Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 16th Jul 2006 22:16
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@indi - thanks!! I'll look next time I'm in (gonna have to have some time off - ingrowing toe nail :-()

Quote: "silly question but its not write protected is it?"

Not so silly - but I have checked. The protection tab seems to be off plus the drive has a "Read Only" light on the front which isn't lighting. Of course, it could be broken

Quote: "have you tried a different tape?"

I have tried two. Neither worked. Both produced the same error. The error is produced without the tape even being looked at. I put the tape in, it "spins up" and a kind of ready light appears on the front. There is no obvious sign that the drive itself is rejecting the tape.

Quote: "can you mount the tape drive on another machine to validate its working?"

This may be my next debugging step. We have a number of Windows machines with tape drives. I'd have to try it on them. Thing is - I dont want to cause the IT Manager any excess work by having a tape drive get broken by a buggered tape!

Quote: "is there a firmware upgrade on the manufacturers site?"

Despite some effort (not yet my best) I haven't been able to find the manafacturers site for downloads. I THINK the company who made the drive (Benchmark(?)) were taken over by Quantum. This doesn't help much as all I can seem to find is a sales landing page. I'm also not sure this is an issue as the system SEEMS to find the hardware and even assigns it to a device. Surely a piece of hardware with out-of-date firmware would not work at all if this were the case? If course I've been wrong before and this IS linux...

Quote: "does the drive read using a bootlinux disc like ubuntu etc.?"

Haven't tried... Wonder which one I should try... Ubuntu/Debian or Knoppix...

Quote: "can you get a diskusage off the tap with du etc.?"

Haven't considered trying that - but dont you have to mount the tape first for that to work?

Cheers Indi! I do appreciate your help here.

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Flindiana Jones
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Posted: 17th Jul 2006 02:19
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sorry to take this off topic, but I just wanted to say that I feel your pain in the ingown toenail. I've had ingrown toenail problems for...26.5 months.


Hope it gets bettter, and that you figure out your tape drive thing!

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Oddmind
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Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Posted: 17th Jul 2006 02:32
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im missing half of both of my pinky toenails.

formerly KrazyJimmy

Prayers for rain...
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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 17th Jul 2006 03:07
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Quote: "I've had ingrown toenail problems for...26.5 months"

Maybe you should see a doctor? I've had enough of mine after about a week!

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Steam Assassin
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Location: behind you...
Posted: 17th Jul 2006 06:19
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Quote: "I've had ingrown toenail problems for...26.5 months. "

Quote: "im missing half of both of my pinky toenails."

Quote: "Maybe you should see a doctor? I've had enough of mine after about a week!"


...


Don't mess with Texas!
...Internet? What the hell is that!
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indi
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Posted: 18th Jul 2006 06:27
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if the reader works on another machine, I have no idea what it could be in linux,
however some distros have tools like crash reporters and hardware probing tools.

have you made another user on your machine and tried with that user account?
this will tell you if the problem is global or user restricted.

good luck with the tape and toe mate, ive been off work for about a month with this broken finger right hand.

my current gf has spastic pinky toes from the crippling but stylish shoes she wears

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Flindiana Jones
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Posted: 18th Jul 2006 08:46
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i've been seeing a doctor for the past...19-20 months. It hasn't helped yet.

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 18th Jul 2006 13:07 Edited at: 18th Jul 2006 16:39
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Quote: "have you made another user on your machine and tried with that user account?
this will tell you if the problem is global or user restricted."

I've tried it as root - that should solve the permission problem
Cheers though.

Hardware probing could be an interesting option... Might have to poke about a bit.

EDIT:
After spending the morning poking about - i've all but given up... I've asked the IT Manager if I can try the tape in another server however he (quite rightly) decided that it's not worth risking the backup facility of a live and important server to debug a development server with very little important stuff on it (apart from all my work )

On one hand - the issues point at a dead drive as the error appears before its even tried to use the drive. Even when trying to get status - it errors.

On the other hand - the drive itself is detected perfectly (according to dmesg, /proc/scsi/scsi and pretty much any other log files). Its even assigned a device. This implies an issue with the tape itself - which could also be "proved" as the tape is over 1 year old and not used in a while.

BUT if its an old tape it should just fail on reading and writing - you should still be able to get status and rewind it and at least TRY to write.

Oh so confused.

As an intermediate solution I've attached a spare external USB Hard disk. Should the internal drives fail I'm putting 1 month retention daily full backups on there.

I've also posted on the LinuxQuestions.org forum too - a slightly more specific place to ask

Cheers for you help guys - I do appreciate it.

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