Re: IDE tape problem in 2.2.17 on Intel SMP

[Camm Maguire <camm@enhanced.com>]

Greetings!  You're not running the ide patches, are you?  We're
running 2.2.17 with the patches, and have found that we must use the
ide-scsi interface to get verifiable backups.  We still get apparently
harmless error messages in the logs though.

Here are our modules.conf entries:

pre-install ide-scsi echo ide_scsi:1 > /proc/ide/hdc/settings 
post-install ide-scsi echo using_dma:0 > /proc/ide/hdc/settings
pre-install ide-tape echo ide_scsi:0 > /proc/ide/hdc/settings
pre-install st /sbin/modprobe -k ide-scsi

We then use /dev/nst0.

I believe these sysctrl parameters are only available with the ide
patches.  You might be able to replicate the functionality with module
options if you're not using the patches.

Take care,

jim@rubylane.com writes:

> I wrote on Nov 2nd about IDE tapes no longer working in 2.2.17.  The
> write seems to work fine, but the verify pass causes read errors and
> a tar abort.
> 
> I tried changing the priority of the tar process to higher than all
> others (it was running as a very low priority job and I thought that
> might be a contributing factor), but the higher priority did not help.
> 
> I tried restoring the last file from the tape.  One day it failed with
> an "unexpected EOF" error, the next day it restored the file correctly
> (even though we got the 12 read errors on the verify pass and tar
> aborted).
> 
> My conclusion is that the tape write is working.  The drive has
> hardware read after write verification, so I kinda thought this was
> the case.  But IDE tape reads appear to be flakey on an active SMP
> setup (Intel).  This problem started the day we switched from 2.2.16
> to 2.2.17, without any other software or hardware changes.
> 
> If I can be of any further help, let me know.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jim Wilcoxson
> Owner, www.rubylane.com
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-- 
Camm Maguire			     			camm@enhanced.com
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