Tape on Dell 2450, changes with no luck

[Scott Long]

Paul Grunwald wrote:
>>>I'm still not seeing the drive under  5.3 GENERIC.
>>>
>>>What else can I try to diagnose the problem?
>>
>>Read at least the documentation!
>>
>>
>>>Can someone who has this working tell me what their switch and jumper
>>
>>settings are set to?
>>
>>Currently you are only seeing the raid container.
>>You have no access to any of the drives itself so far.
>>
>>In aac(4) manpage:
>>     Access to RAID containers is available via the /dev/aacd? device
>>nodes.
>>     The aacp device enables the SCSI pass-thru interface and allows
>>devices
>>     connected to the card such as cdroms to be available via the CAM
>>scsi(4)
>>     subsystem.  Note that not all cards allow this interface to be
>>enabled.
>>
> 
> 
> I have had complete access to the RAID container and it is working fine.
> The tape drive is not part of the container.  "camcontrol devlist" is not
> showing anything so it is at a level below the driver.
> 
> FYI - after spending 1.5 hours on the phone with dell we determined that the
> onboard 7899 controller is bad.  I have been troubleshooting a hardware
> problem.  We only got it to show once at boot time in bios after a NVRAM
> wipe.  The PERC controller will not support the tape drive itself.  This is
> the reason the sa driver is not picking up the tape drive.
> 
> 

Sorry for coming into the conversation late.  Since this is my driver 
and I'm very familiar with the 2450, the 7899, and scsi in general,
can I ask a few questions?  First, it's not clear from your previous
emails that the tape drive in on a different channel from the disk
drives.  There might be confusion here because you kept on refering
to the target id of each device as a 'channel', whereas it's normal
to refer to each cable as a channel that contains up to 15 targets.
The boot BIOS should show both a PERC banner and a 7899/Ultra160 banner.
If the tape drive is on the second channel then it should show up under
the 7899 banner, not the PERC banner.  If your system only has a single
cable/channel servicing the entire backplane, then I guess that you have 
no choice but to have the tape on the same channel as the raid disks,
but again I need more details here.  And if that's the case, then we
might need to hack the aacp driver a bit to make it work.
The only exception to what I said earlier would be if you are using
the 'latest and greatest' PERC BIOS, which is rumored to commandeer the
second SCSI channel and forces all SCSI to go through the RAID device.
If this is the case, then I'd like to see if it would be possible to
get remote access to this machine so I can investigate further.

Scott