FC attached tape drives

[Rick Stevens]

Allen, Jack wrote:
> Has any body hooked up FC attached tape drive to be use as general 
> purpose tape drive using Red Hat AS 4? I don't have all the details of 
> the hardware configuration because it is someone asking me how to do 
> this. They said the lpfc driver is loaded and they have tried "modprobe 
> st", but no /dev/st* device get created. I am thinking it needs to be 
> another driver, but I don't know which one.

We're using a StorageTek changer with 4 drives on AS3U5 (still a 2.4
kernel) on QLogic 2340s.

Generally, you don't "modprobe st".  You do have to make sure that the
driver for your FC hostadapter is loaded (ideally at boot time via the
ramdisk).  You can then "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" to verify that the device
was seen by the driver.  Remember that the SCSI busses are enumerated at
boot time, so it's best to make sure the driver is in the ramdisk.

If you don't know how to do that, put an

	alias scsi_hostadapterX drivername

line in your /etc/modprobe.conf file.  If you have more than one line
like that, replace the "X" with a sequential digit, e.g.:

	alias scsi_hostadapter aic79xx
	alias scsi_hostadapter1 qla2300
	alias scsi_hostadapter2 lpfc

Then rebuild your ramdisk image:

	cd /boot
	mkinitrd -f -v initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`

and verify in the output of the command that your driver got inserted
into the image.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-        Polygon: A dead parrot (With apologies to John Cleese)      -
----------------------------------------------------------------------