Installing tape drive on SunBlade 2000

I have a SCSI AIT tape drive Sony SDX-D500C which would like to install
(Solaris 10). I tried devfsadm -v but it doesn't work. Looking on net but
can not find any information.
Any help will be very appreciate.
Thank you,
Emanuel

On 2009-02-23, Emanuel Marciniak <> wrote:
> I have a SCSI AIT tape drive Sony SDX-D500C which would like to install
> (Solaris 10). I tried devfsadm -v but it doesn't work. Looking on net but
> can not find any information.

Hmm ... try:

devfsadm -c tape

or, if that doesn't work,

touch /reconfigure
reboot

Look for entries in /dev/rmt/ before and after doing this. If
you already have entries in /dev/rmt which refer to drives not currently
in the system, add "-C" before "-c tape" on the devfsadm line to clean
up old entries of the class "tape".

But -- it may be that you will need to get the proper
information for that specific drive from somewhere (try the maker), and
make appropriate additions to /kernel/drv/st.conf.

I had to make additions for my Mammoth 2 drives, and this is I
believe newer than the Mammoth-2.

Good Luck,
DoN.

--
Email: <> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

"DoN. Nichols" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On 2009-02-23, Emanuel Marciniak <> wrote:
>> I have a SCSI AIT tape drive Sony SDX-D500C which would like to install
>> (Solaris 10). I tried devfsadm -v but it doesn't work. Looking on net
>> but
>> can not find any information.
>
> Hmm ... try:
>
> devfsadm -c tape
>
> or, if that doesn't work,
>
> touch /reconfigure
> reboot
>
> Look for entries in /dev/rmt/ before and after doing this. If
> you already have entries in /dev/rmt which refer to drives not currently
> in the system, add "-C" before "-c tape" on the devfsadm line to clean
> up old entries of the class "tape".
>
> But -- it may be that you will need to get the proper
> information for that specific drive from somewhere (try the maker), and
> make appropriate additions to /kernel/drv/st.conf.
>
> I had to make additions for my Mammoth 2 drives, and this is I
> believe newer than the Mammoth-2.
>
> Good Luck,
> DoN
>
> --
> Email: <> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
> (too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
> --- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

Thank you DoN,
It did not wirk ufortunatelly. I need tofind information to enter in
../kernel/drv/st.conf
Thank you again
Emanuel

DoN. Nichols <> wrote:
> But -- it may be that you will need to get the proper
> information for that specific drive from somewhere (try the maker), and
> make appropriate additions to /kernel/drv/st.conf.

Do this:

strings /kernel/drv/st | grep SDX
Any entries?

I see the support is present in the current opensolaris codebase, but I
have no idea if it's in older releases of Solaris 10. Check for patches
to 'st'.

If nothing else, use the current codebase to construct your own st.conf
entry.

http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xr...gets/st_conf.c

Lines 2339 through 2373 would suggest something like:

#Match section
"SONY SDX-*", "Sony AIT", "SONY-AIT",

#Definition section
SONY-AIT = 1,0x3c,0,0x1018659,1,0x30,0;

You need to get the vendor-product ID string correct in the front. The
sun driver will do wildcards here, but I don't know if you can do
wildcards in the st.conf file.

> I had to make additions for my Mammoth 2 drives, and this is I
> believe newer than the Mammoth-2.

That one I think is in all releases of Solaris 10.

# strings /kernel/drv/st | grep 8900
Mammoth EXB-8900 8mm Helical Scan
EXABYTE EXB-8900

--
Darren

Emanuel Marciniak <> wrote:

> I have a SCSI AIT tape drive Sony SDX-D500C which would like to install
> (Solaris 10). I tried devfsadm -v but it doesn't work. Looking on net but
> can not find any information.
> Any help will be very appreciate.
> Thank you,
> Emanuel


Just to toss this out, are you sure it's hooked up correctly?

Being it's SCSI it needs to follow the same rules for termination as does
hard drives. You didn't mention if you are internally mounting it or if it's
in an external cabinet (not sure what a sunblade 2000 is, never owned one).

The Sony sdx drives also have a set of dip switches underneath them but
memory is foggy if it's for the scsi address (those might of been on the
back). A couple of those I remember being important for use with Solaris or
Sun Machines, had something to do with the way the drive would be detected
and if standby mode, if it actually went to sleep or something.

Damn can't remember anymore.

I think one of the dips controlled if the tape drive was to report "ready"
even if in standby mode (no tape loaded). So what I'm saying is, hooked up
to the box, dip is in the wrong mode for "Sun", no tape loaded, machine
boots, it will not see the drive.

But I think with a tape loaded it doesn't make any difference if the dips
are left on default, so likely it's a termination problem or scsi address
isn't set to something sane (think you could go up to 15 on those if on a
wide card).

On a more dire note, if you bought it used (ebay, craigslist), it's a good
chance it's defective. Before disks got cheap we used to have a sdx-300c on
everything sun and except for one of them, every one that died did exactly
the same thing, just went invisible out of the blue. The one status
indicator was on, they would load and manually eject the tape but just not
show up any more as a device. Like the on-board controller failed.

-bruce

On 2009-02-24, Darren Dunham <> wrote:
> DoN. Nichols <> wrote:

[ ... ]

> You need to get the vendor-product ID string correct in the front. The
> sun driver will do wildcards here, but I don't know if you can do
> wildcards in the st.conf file.
>
>> I had to make additions for my Mammoth 2 drives, and this is I
>> believe newer than the Mammoth-2.
>
> That one I think is in all releases of Solaris 10.
>
> # strings /kernel/drv/st | grep 8900
> Mammoth EXB-8900 8mm Helical Scan
> EXABYTE EXB-8900

*That* one is for the Mammoth-1. The Mammoth-2 does not have a
four-digit model number like the 8900. Here is what I had to add for
the Mammoth-2:

And -- the strings search there won't work on a SPARC based
Solaris 10 system. Instead, make that:

# strings /kernel/drv/sparcv9/st | grep '8900'

================================================== ====================
"EXABYTE Mammoth2", "Mammoth2 8mm Helical Scan", "M2";
M2 = 1,0x35,0,0x19e39,1,0x28,0;
================================================== ====================

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: <> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2009-02-24, Bruce Esquibel <> wrote:
> Emanuel Marciniak <> wrote:
>
>> I have a SCSI AIT tape drive Sony SDX-D500C which would like to install
>> (Solaris 10). I tried devfsadm -v but it doesn't work. Looking on net but
>> can not find any information.
>> Any help will be very appreciate.
>> Thank you,
>> Emanuel
>
>
> Just to toss this out, are you sure it's hooked up correctly?
>
> Being it's SCSI it needs to follow the same rules for termination as does
> hard drives. You didn't mention if you are internally mounting it or if it's
> in an external cabinet (not sure what a sunblade 2000 is, never owned one).

The Sun Blade 2000 has room for a tape drive and a DVD-ROM drive
(both 50-pin SCSI) inside, along with a floppy and/or a smart-card
reader. (Both of the last two if you don't have the tape drive
installed.) The cable includes the terminator at its end (just past the
DVD-ROM drive), so as long as you're using the standard cable, you are
fine as far as termination is concerned. BTW -- that SCSI bus is used
*only* for the DVD-ROM and the optional tape drive. The floppy and the
Smart Card reader both have their own cables going to the system board.

There is also an external SCSI bus -- 68-pin -- on the back.
This talks to *nothing* internal to the box.

And the two internal disks are FC-AL (Fibre Channel), not SCSI,
so they don't argue with either SCSI bus.

Assuming that the system sees the DVD-ROM drive, then the
internal SCSI bus is good.

> The Sony sdx drives also have a set of dip switches underneath them but
> memory is foggy if it's for the scsi address (those might of been on the
> back). A couple of those I remember being important for use with Solaris or
> Sun Machines, had something to do with the way the drive would be detected
> and if standby mode, if it actually went to sleep or something.
>
> Damn can't remember anymore.
>
> I think one of the dips controlled if the tape drive was to report "ready"
> even if in standby mode (no tape loaded). So what I'm saying is, hooked up
> to the box, dip is in the wrong mode for "Sun", no tape loaded, machine
> boots, it will not see the drive.

What's the Sun barcode number for this? I can't seem to find a
Sony tape drive of any flavor in the FEH (Field Engineer's Handbook).
Assuming that we are talking about DAT drives, I find Archive, Conner,
Seagate, HP, and some autoloaders. No Sonys. (Perhaps look up the man
page for your drive on the Australian collection of Sun FEH pages.

O.K. A look for the model on Google shows that it is an AIT
drive, too new for the last printed FEH to cover.

This web site documents the switch settings:

================================================== ====================
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/tape-dri...-SDX-300C.html
================================================== ====================

and it appears to be a 68-pin SCSI, so it would have to go in an
external housing.

> But I think with a tape loaded it doesn't make any difference if the dips
> are left on default, so likely it's a termination problem or scsi address
> isn't set to something sane (think you could go up to 15 on those if on a
> wide card).

Most of the switch elements and jumpers shown by the above web
site are "Factory configured -- do not alter". The remaining ones are:

(1) TERMPWR (jp1 pins 9 and 10)

(2) Compression enable (SW1/7)

(3) Parity enabled (SW1/8)

> On a more dire note, if you bought it used (ebay, craigslist), it's a good
> chance it's defective. Before disks got cheap we used to have a sdx-300c on
> everything sun and except for one of them, every one that died did exactly
> the same thing, just went invisible out of the blue. The one status
> indicator was on, they would load and manually eject the tape but just not
> show up any more as a device. Like the on-board controller failed.

Oops! Not nearly as reliable as the Exabyte Mammoth and
Mammoth-2 drives, I guess. :-(

Good Luck,
DoN.

--
Email: <> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

DoN. Nichols <> wrote:

> This web site documents the switch settings:

> ================================================== ====================
> http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/tape-dri...-SDX-300C.html
> ================================================== ====================


Just as a pointless follow up, I looked around the junk pile for one of the
old drives (don't me why we keep this stuff) but unless this was for a
different version, the tag on the bottom spells this out...

Dip Switch (s1-s8)

off = 0 X XXXX
on = 1 XXX (default settings)
87654321

s4 s3 s2 s1 firmware selection
0 0 0 0 standard (default)
0 0 0 1 ibm rs/6000 - disconnect
0 0 1 1 sgi
0 0 1 1 ibm rs/6000 - no disconnect
0 1 0 1 sco & xenix
1 0 1 0 sun - non buffered enabled
1 1 0 0 dec
1 1 0 1 hp
1 1 1 0 sun - non buffered disabled

s5 = terminator power
s6 = terminator enable
s7 = dc control (1)
s8 = dc control (2)

So I don't know really, the URL you gave shows s1 to s6 as "do not alter"
and the termination stuff appears moved from that dip to the other jumper
block. s7 and s8 sort of match (or comes close).

Maybe all of this is for an earlier version, suppose of the OP is at wits
end trying to get it to work, maybe using one of the "sun" patterns for it
might help.

-bruce

Don't know if you checked this, but make sure there's an entry in /etc/driver_aliases for:

st "scsiclass"

I've been bitten a couple of times by backup admins making changes and the entry disappearing. Without the entry, tape devices won't get created.

Thank you everybody for response. Got hooked on some very important project
so will try suggestions after I finish it.
Thanks again,

"Emanuel Marciniak" <> wrote in message
news:T1Fol.1239$...
>I have a SCSI AIT tape drive Sony SDX-D500C which would like to install
>(Solaris 10). I tried devfsadm -v but it doesn't work. Looking on net but
>can not find any information.
> Any help will be very appreciate.
> Thank you,
> Emanuel
>