Networker 7.3.4 and IBM 3584 Library with Red Hat Linux

Are you using IBM drivers or those native by Linux? If IBM, I believe it creates special device handle that you should use instead.

I was using native drivers but have started to wonder if I need IBM's driver.

I don't have access to the 3584 for another couple of weeks when I test this again. This time I was going to go armed with the IBM lin_tape driver.

For my last test there were 4 tape drives allocated to my rhel5 backup server and they were present in the system as IBM TS1120 and the usual device names under /dev like nst0, nst1....

Since I could not get the drives to work properly with native linux commands like mt (although "mt -f /dev/nst0 status" worked ok) I didn't proceed to trying to configure them in networker. After loading a tape with the web interface and trying a rewind just gave an i/o error...wonder if the tape was even loaded in one of my 4 drives. All of this hardware is new to me so I am rather suspicious.

This hardware is not ours but supplied to us offsite for DR purposes so I don't have access to it at the moment.

I guess what I am really asking is Will the 3584 library work with native linux ?

Thx.

I guess it should, but you never know with IBM - they do drivers for everything.

Nevertheless, you said that rewind failed from jukebox web GUI - if that fails the problem might be library related and have nothing to do with Linux as with web GUI you are bypassing OS.

Hi,

Red Hat Linux 5 uses the 2.6 Kernel - as such there are a second set of device entry points - try using the GUI detect and set the option to use persistent IDs at detection time, this option will then use the newer Linux devices and NOT the older style /dev/nstx.

Following a recent upgrade on a production Red Hat server this approach has provided a more stable interface to the tape devices.


HtH

IKP


Sorry forgot to mention we are using 7.4sp4. You may have to use jbconfug to specify the new persistent device paths with 7.3.x.