On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Tom Haws wrote:
I'm having problems adding an Exabyte Magnum LTO-2 tape device to my RHL 9 machine. I know that's a different OS, so thius question should go in the shrike lists, but it's close enough to Fedora that I thought I might get some answers here, and the shrike lists are just about dead now. Red Hat announced the end of RHL 9 2 months after I installed a production server on it... arrrghh...
Anyway, after I add the device, it shows up fine in /proc/scsi/sci, and I can write to it, but it is extremely slow. I got about 30MB written in 5 minutes! Has anyone else had any experience with LTO-2 devices on Fedora or RHL 9 systems, and is there anything I can do to recreate device files or anything to speed it up?
Also, do you know if I do a "mknod -m 666 /dev/st0 c 9 0" with the tape drive hooked up, does it do anything different than if there wasn't one installed? Like read the status bits on the drive to tell what it's capabilities are?
Tom,
I have a similar problem on a DLT-1 on a FC1 computer, and had problems with speed until I found the proper way to write to the tape. Here are the commands to prime the tape:
modprobe st buffer_kbs=1024 max_buffers=128 max_sg_segs=128 blocking_open=1
mt setblk $[64*1024]
#test tar -cf - .|mbuffer -s $[64*1024] > /dev/tape mbuffer -s $[64*1024] < /dev/tape > /dev/null
You can find mbuffer at: http://directory.fsf.org/All_Packages_in_Directory/mbuffer.html
ed
