RA Cohen wrote:
You're starting to sound a little desperate! If you don't receive any better informed responses, then maybe this will help.Hi All, I'm re-posting and re-framing this problem somewhat... I'm running several Compaq Proliant DL360 servers, all with FBSD 6.0-RELEASE. One of these has an internal Quantum DLT 4000 (that's how the BIOS identifies it -- I am seeing the drive ID'd by the BIOS as the machine boots) tape drive. I need to use it, but can find no evidence of this hardware in the dmesg output. I've googled around and really all I can locate are references to CAM, the aacp driver compiled in the kernel, and device.hints. Can someone put this all together for me? I'm not a newbie, have compiled many kernels and worlds, and have been a FBSD user for several years.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Compaq Proliant DL360 servers, and hope fervently never to be associated with anything that has Compaq in it's name.
Since the IDA hardware that this tape drive is attached to is basically some kind of RAID, perhaps either it, or it's FreeBSD driver simply does not support tape drives.
The ida0 message in your dmesg, certainly says 0 drives, whereas ida1 is reporting 2 logical drives. That, to me, means that either the card or the driver is just not seeing the tape drive, and it's possible that no hint or kernel option will change that.
When you say that the tape is reported by the BIOS, I assume that this is a BIOS specifically for the IDA controller. If not, and it has a BIOS you can do things in, then have a look in there. This is probably what you've done already... But if there are any config options, play with them.
If that fails, the there are two more things to try:1) Look through the source code and see if you can find any reference to the driver recognising tape drives. This might not be easy :-(
2) Email the authors of the ida drivers and see if the driver does support tapes. The man page on 5.4 talks a lot about disks and not at all about tapes, but that might be misleading.
If both of those fail, then you may need to get an add on, bog standard SCSI card that's supported by FreeBSD. Something like the cheapest Adaptec which will drive the tape at full speed.
--Alex PS I assume there's nothing obvious like termination causing the problem.PPS A quick google for "freebsd ida tape drive" did have two relevant hits (the first two) but they didn't help me much since the conversations seemed to start half way through. However, one is from one of the driver developers, and does suggest a cheap Adaptec card :-)