> After checking with Sun, I determined that Solaris 2.3 has builtin support
> for the Exabyte 8505 and 8500 but not the 8500c. I then found out from the
> Exabyte Corporation that the problem could be solved by adding the following
> entry to the /kernel/drv/st.conf file:
>
> # Entry for the Exabyte EXB-8500C 8mm tape drive #
> tape-config-list =
> "EXABYTE EXB8500C", "Exabyte 8MM EXB8500C", "EXBT-8CC";
> EXBT-8CC = 1,0x35,1024,0x0039,4,0x8c,0x15,0x90,0x14,3;
>
> Well, this took care of the SCSI I/O errors. ufsdump and tar appeared to
> access the drive as well.
>
> However, when attempted to restore an AFS volume in our cell, I noticed
> that over 8 hours was required to read EACH tape involved in the restoration,
I don't know about Solaris 2.3, but under 4.1.3 you need to
set the ST_KNOWS_EOD option in st_conf, else the tape driver will do
an 'mt fsf 500' as 500 seporate 'fsf 1's. I don't have any Exabytes
on 2.3 machines, but it looks like if you change the 0x0039 in your
st.conf entry to 0x0239 things should run better.
I don't know why ST_KNOWS_EOD wasn't recomended by Exabyte.
Perhaps putting a lot of small files on big tape is just not that
common. I've been running it on 4.1.3 for a while without any
problems.
-Karl
