SEO

I've just landed in a situation where an old IBM RS/6000 7025 F40
running AIX 4.2.1 has had it's tape drive fail. The tape drive in
question is an HP C1533A 4mm 4GB/8GB DAT drive. It repeatedly gets
write failures, and my trusty techique of whacking the cleaning tape
in hasn't worked. Unfortunately the only person that knew anything
about the server is long gone, and as I was the first person to admit
to having used *nix (and being the new guy) it has fallen to me to try
and find a solution.

I've sourced a Sony SDT-5010, which appears to be pretty much
identical to the defective HP unit other than the branding (same
flavour of SCSI interface, supports the same media etc) but I don't
really know anything about making hardware changes under AIX. From
what I've discovered from googling and attempting to read some manuals
it seems that I should be able to do the following:

1. Remove the current tape drive in smit
2. Power down
3. Remove defective unit
4. Insert 'new' unit
5. Power up
6. Add new tape drive in smit

This all seems a bit too easy to me... is there something that I am
missing? drivers/files that need updating? Configuration that smit
doesn't tidy up when removing, or sort out when adding?

Can someone out there with some actual experience, rather than my
'this ought to work' approach, point out anything that I'm missing...
I'm happy to admit being a total AIX novice - I started in this job
last week and that was my first exposure to AIX (I'm meant to be
Windows Server support - but foolishly admitted to having used a few
flavours of *nix in the past) - and I would really like this change to
be as painfree as possible

Thanks
Simon Smith

<gphaedrus@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1194492543.793302.256780@q5g2000prf.googlegro ups.com...
> I've just landed in a situation where an old IBM RS/6000 7025 F40
> running AIX 4.2.1 has had it's tape drive fail. The tape drive in
> question is an HP C1533A 4mm 4GB/8GB DAT drive. It repeatedly gets
> write failures, and my trusty techique of whacking the cleaning tape
> in hasn't worked. Unfortunately the only person that knew anything
> about the server is long gone, and as I was the first person to admit
> to having used *nix (and being the new guy) it has fallen to me to try
> and find a solution.
>
> I've sourced a Sony SDT-5010, which appears to be pretty much
> identical to the defective HP unit other than the branding (same
> flavour of SCSI interface, supports the same media etc) but I don't
> really know anything about making hardware changes under AIX. From
> what I've discovered from googling and attempting to read some manuals
> it seems that I should be able to do the following:
>
> 1. Remove the current tape drive in smit
> 2. Power down
> 3. Remove defective unit
> 4. Insert 'new' unit
> 5. Power up
> 6. Add new tape drive in smit
>
> This all seems a bit too easy to me... is there something that I am
> missing? drivers/files that need updating? Configuration that smit
> doesn't tidy up when removing, or sort out when adding?
>
> Can someone out there with some actual experience, rather than my
> 'this ought to work' approach, point out anything that I'm missing...
> I'm happy to admit being a total AIX novice - I started in this job
> last week and that was my first exposure to AIX (I'm meant to be
> Windows Server support - but foolishly admitted to having used a few
> flavours of *nix in the past) - and I would really like this change to
> be as painfree as possible
>
> Thanks
> Simon Smith
>
Simon
Here is all the info you will need
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...rs6000_f80.htm

Good Luck
Basil

gphaedrus@gmail.com schrieb:

>
> 1. Remove the current tape drive in smit
> 2. Power down
> 3. Remove defective unit
> 4. Insert 'new' unit
> 5. Power up
> 6. Add new tape drive in smit
>
> This all seems a bit too easy to me...

Most often (i.e. if the hardware is OK and supported)
it really is this easy. You can even drop step 6 in your
list, because AIX does it for you at boot time.
The new drive will probably be recognized as "ost"
("other SCSI tape"). A little pitfall might be the tape's
blocksize which is automatically set to 512 (mostly, but I have
also seen 1024 here). If the old drive's setting was different,
the new drive will be unable to read the old media.
Just set the block size to the value used with the old drive,
or to 0 (means variable block size).
At step 1, don't forget to remove the drive completely,
i.e. don't keep it in the database, otherwise it is kept
as a zombie entry, and the new drive would be named /dev/rmt1 rather
than /dev/rmt0.

On Nov 8, 9:37 pm, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae...@gsi.de> wrote:
>
> Most often (i.e. if the hardware is OK and supported)
> it really is this easy. You can even drop step 6 in your
> list, because AIX does it for you at boot time.
> The new drive will probably be recognized as "ost"
> ("other SCSI tape"). A little pitfall might be the tape's
> blocksize which is automatically set to 512 (mostly, but I have
> also seen 1024 here). If the old drive's setting was different,
> the new drive will be unable to read the old media.
> Just set the block size to the value used with the old drive,
> or to 0 (means variable block size).
> At step 1, don't forget to remove the drive completely,
> i.e. don't keep it in the database, otherwise it is kept
> as a zombie entry, and the new drive would be named /dev/rmt1 rather
> than /dev/rmt0.

I had noticed that the old drive was set to variable block size, so
will definitely keep the same settings with the new drive. Thanks for
the tip with removing the drive completely... one of the things I want
to make sure is that it appears to all scripts etc as the same device,
as I'd rather not have to update anything even something simple as
replacing /dev/rmt0 with /dev/rmt1.

Thanks for your reply Michael, I'm feeling much more comfortable about
making this change now