SUMMARY: Overland Neo, Legato Networker, Solaris 8 - no go

From: Eric Trager <Eric.Trager_at_cbel.cit.nih.gov>
Date: Mon Dec 09 2002 - 16:18:53 EST
First, thanks to those who wrote to me with suggestions and thoughts, 
including

Julie Peers
David Eisner
Wanke Matthias
Marco Breedeveld
Joe Fletcher
Luc Suryo

I have to say that this issue did not get resolved the way I would have
liked. What I ended up doing, as an experiment, was to connect the Neo
library to a Linux server obtained from Western Scientific that was host
to an external LVD SCSI RAID enclosure. With the terminator on the jukebox
now lit green, reporting an LVD connection, Networker was able to find and
communicate with the jukebox enough to install it.

What I am forced to assume is that the SE-SCSI port on the E6500 created
such a poor connection to the jukebox (whose end was a VHDCI Micro
Centronics 68-pin) and its drives that, while the devices were all
detected on boot and the tape drives could be read from/written to,
Networker could not communicate well enough with the jukebox to do
anything with it other than see it.

We are going to get one of the two jukeboxes into production over SCSI
with a Linux node fitted with an Adaptec 29160. We are going to try to get
the optional jukebox fiber connection working with the 6500 using the
other library, since the SCSI connection is a no-go with that server and 
we don't want to invest in another expensive sbus card.

- Eric

-------

Original Post:

This is something of a shot in the dark, but we're caught in a bad
situation and my hope is someone reading this may have worked his/her way
out of a similar situation.

We are trying to get an Overland Neo LXN4000 series jukebox with two HP
LTO drives working with an E6500 server. The drives and jukebox are
connected to one another using VHDCI micro SCSI connections, and the box
is then connected to the server using a wide 68-pin-to-68-pin-VHDCI cable.
The terminator on the end of the chain on the jukebox is lit red
indicating an SE connection. The server, using tar, can easily write and
read to the drives. The MTX program (mtx.sourceforge.net) can communicate
with the jukebox and move tapes around, including to and from the drives.

The problem starts with Legato Networker. The software cannot seem to be
able to communicate with the jukebox robotics. jbconfig finds the jukebox
but after confirming the SCSI control port it simply says it's unable to
access the jukebox. The sjirdtag program spits out

bash-2.04# /etc/LGTOuscsi/sjirdtag scsidev@7.6.0
SJIRDP: Device busy
Code:0x29, Str=<I/O error>

Legato support has been communicating with me (slowly) for the last couple
of weeks, but we've gotten nowhere. I'm using version 6.1.2. I've been
hoping they could tell me about a good debugging program to try but
nothing has given any useful information.

Overland has been helpful but they believe it is a Legato issue,
especially since tar and mtx have no issues with the system. The only
reason I doubt that a little is when I reset the server and drop to the ok
prompt, probe-scsi-all reports the HP drives properly, but when it is
supposed to report the Overland (OVERLANDNEO Series), it says

Unknown message 2

I am open to any and all theories, suggestions, and similar war stories on
this kind of thing. I'm just looking for new ideas at this point.
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Received on Mon Dec 9 16:20:58 2002

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