SUMMARY: L9 Autoloader configuration

Thanks to Ric Anderson <ric@Opus1.COM>, Yura Pismerov <ypismerov@tucows.com>, 
Jay Lessert <jayl@accelerant.net>, Michael Lehmann <maal1@gmx.de> for their 
quick replies.

For whatever reason, I couldn't find any reference to Solaris not including 
support for the tape robot automatically. As mentioned below, you have to 
either buy a commercial product (Veritas NetBackup or Solstice Backup) and 
use their support or use a free solution like stctl or Solaris's sgen driver.

I opted to use the sgen driver, since I couldn't find a reference of anyone 
using stctl with Solaris 9 (however, I have no real reason to think that it 
won't). Combined with mtx, this is working fine so far. I also have sgen only 
looking for "changer" devices, and so the tape device is still under st; I'm 
not sure if this is the optimal way to do it yet, but it's easy to change.

Thanks to everyone who replied! Their replies are included below.

Simon Kuhn
UNIX Admin

Ric Anderson:
Sun does not ship robotic support with either their drives or
the system.  You have to use Solstice Backup (aka, legato)
to fiddle the robot.  I didn't like that option, as I wanted my tapes
in ufsdump format so I could do a bare metal restore.  As a result
I'm using stctl with an L-280 (predecessor to the L-9).  You can
get stctl from
    ftp://ftp.cs.pdx.edu/pub/users/eric/stctl/stctl-1.3b.tar.gz
I've been using this in production on Solaris 8 and 7 systems for
about a year with no problems.  I expect it will work under Solaris 9
also.

Yura Pismerov:
        Yes, it is not supposed to be...
        You may want to check this: http://mtx.sourceforge.net

        Personally I use mtx and sgen driver to control the robot under
Solaris9.

Here is excerpt from Amanda docs regarding setting it up:
        
The configuration on solaris 2.8 with the sgen driver is done by
creating 
the file /kernel/drv/sgen.conf
This file should contain at the beginning the following
device-type-config-list="changer","sequential"

This will force the driver to attach only to the devices with type
either 
changer (the robot) and sequential (the tape).
Next you must tell the driver on which id it should check for devices
(tape on id 5, robot on id 6 in this example),
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=5 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=6 lun=0;

This will create the 2 device files
/dev/scsi/sequential/c0t5d0         (scsitapedev option in
chg-scsi.conf)
/dev/scsi/changer/c0t6d0            (changer option in chg-scsi.conf)

So the complete sgen.conf looks like:
device-type-config-list="changer","sequential
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=5 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=6 lun=0;


Jay Lessert:
The sgen(7D) driver is available.

/kernel/drv/sgen.conf is commented out by default.

My sgen.conf currently looks like:

device-type-config-list="changer";
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=0 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=1 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=2 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=3 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=4 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=5 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=6 lun=0;
name="sgen" class="scsi" target=7 lun=0;

Everything I know about setting it up I learned from installing
mtx (http://mtx.sourceforge.net), contrib/config_sgen_solaris.sh

Your changer should then show up in /dev/scsi/changer/.

I really like mtx; your L9 is not currently on the "known compatible"
list, but there is a very good chance it will just work.

Michael Lehmann:
the auto-loader mechanism and the drive share the same SCSI ID but have
different LUNs.

[snip]

The Sun L9 is an HP 1/9. If you buy the RMC (Remote Management Card)
mentioned in the manual, you can control the auto-loader from a web-browser.
Some time ago there was a posting about using the L9 with MTX (magnetic tape 
exchange ?) and AMANDA.
Because I didn't found a precompiled MTX and the auto-loader was attached to 
out production E3500, we used BrightStor Enterprise Backup instead.
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