adaptec 2940u/uw dump card state ends

[Jesse Guardiani]

Don Lewis wrote:


[...]

> My first guess would not be termination.  I would think that a
> termination problem would muck up data transfers and would affect all
> attempts to use the changer.

Well, it may be too soon to tell, but this past Monday (or maybe Sunday? I
can't remember) the machine spontaneously rebooted on me during a backup
cycle to the tape drive. It was midnight, but I decided to take a trip to
the office and have a look at it anyway.

In the adaptec SCSI controller, I had the termination set to OFF for the LOW
and HIGH parts of the bus. I changed this to AUTO for LOW and AUTO for HIGH
and I turned off Ultra SCSI capability on the controller.

I'm not sure which of those changes fixed the problem, but so far - 3 or 4
days later - I haven't seen a single timeout and no spontaneous reboots.

Hopefully it's fixed!


> How long is the time from when you issue the changer command to when the
> driver coughs up this error?  I'm not familiar with this drive/changer
> combination, but the DDS changer that I use takes a lot longer to swap
> tapes if the tape currently in the drive is wound all the way to the
> end, because the drive first has to rewind it before it can unload the
> tape.  Subsequent tape changes won't take as long if the tape currently
> in the drive is still at the beginning ...
> 
> How is the changer connected to the 2940u/uw?  If you are using an eight
> bit cable

Not sure what "bit" count it has, but it's an external wide cable. 50 pin,
maybe?


> you'll want to configure the 2940u/uw to terminate the upper
> 8 bits of the bus but not the lower 8.

I think this may have been the problem. Setting both halves to "auto"
probably fixed it.

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
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