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HP Ultrium Tape Drive User Manual

Page 24

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Linux

24

Latest SCSI controller drivers for Linux will be available from the manufacturer’s web site.

In order to communicate with a tape device, the operating system needs to have drivers for the

tape and the underlying transport mechanism (the host bus adaptor) loaded. Ensure that both

are available as either loadable modules (for example, usable with

insmod

and visible with

lsmod

) or are statically built into your kernel.

NOTE:

In order to add drivers to the statically built kernel you need the Linux source code

available on disk and knowledge of how to use the kernel building tools that ship with various

Linux distributions. This should not be attempted by novice users.

In order to determine if the drive has been detected by the tape driver at module load time,

execute:

dmesg | grep "st"

This should find a number of lines. One should look like:

Detected SCSI tape st0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 5, lun 0

To load the tape driver module if it is not loaded as above, execute:

insmod st

to load it. This should happen naturally if your system is rebooted after attaching the drive.

When the

ST

driver module has been added, a list of tape device files will be created

automatically. They reside in the

/dev/

directory and have the syntax:

/dev/stp or dev/nstp

where:

In order to enable large transfers under Linux (>64 KB per write), edit the file

/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/st_options.h

and change the definition of

ST_BUFFER_BLOCKS

.

sym53c8xx

This is a SCSI chipset driver for the LSI Logic family of HBAs (amongst others).

aic7xxx

This is a SCSI chipset driver for the Adaptec 7xxx chipset family (such as

Adaptec 29160LP).

p

is the instance number of the device file. (If only one drive is connected to the system, this will

be 0.)

n

indicates that this is a no-rewind driver.