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I'm trying to hot plug a EXB-8900 tape drive into Solaris 10 and having issues.

Here's the process I follow. Please note this has worked:

cfgadm -x insert_device c4

yes at the first prompt to suspend SCSI activity on the c4 HBA. Next I connect and power on the device then input yes to the second prompt to complete the operation. At this point the terminal hangs and even after waiting for quite some time nothing happens. I repeated this exact same process to connect a different tape drive (Mammoth-2) and it worked without any issues.

checking the logs showed nothing

cat /var/adm/messages

Any further ideas how I could troubleshoot whats happening?

Thanks,

grephappiness
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  • Could it be a bad tape drive? Does that EXB-8900 drive work on another server? – Andrew Henle Nov 04 '16 at 10:43
  • @AndrewHenle I have a M400 Sparc server I'm trying to bring online and configure to test the tape drive with. Hopefully that will lead me somewhere. – grephappiness Nov 04 '16 at 14:47
  • @AndrewHenle it looks like the tape drive was not compatible based on testing it with another system and checking the HBA POST as J R replied below. I'll have to find another model that meets our requirements and get better confirmation it'll work on Solaris 10. – grephappiness Nov 25 '16 at 18:31

1 Answers1

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I would never try to hot-plug a SCSI device. Different HBAs react differently but you will always get a scsi-reset which doesn't guarantee it will correctly (re)discover a new device.

Do it properly by plugging it and rebooting to single user mode. The HBA POST will show you if it has seen the drive, and you can always check it is all ok in single user mode, if not shut down once more.

J R Spigot
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