no tape - ENXIO - device not configured

[Matthew Jacob]

open the control device- that's what it's there for.

On 12/17/05, Dan Langille <dan at langille.org> wrote:
>
> You probably know that I'm a developer on the Bacula
> <http://www.bacula.org/> project.  One of the issues we're trying to
> improve now is using the tape drive when there is no tape.
>
> Basically Bacula needs to open() the tape drive so that it can
> read/write it.  On both Linux and Solaris, it is possible to open the
> drive with O_NONBLOCK and get a descriptor that can be used for
> ioctl() calls and providing there is a tape in the drive, it can be
> used for read() and write().
>
> On FreeBSD, if there is no tape in the drive, the OS always
> immediately returns errno=ENXIO "Device not configured".  This means
> that on FreeBSD, if there is no tape in the drive, that drive is
> totally unusable by Bacula.
>
> Another developer, who actually does most of the tape writing
> routines had two suggestions:
>
> 1. Modify Bacula and system dependent code that opens the control
> device to see if a tape drive is really there or not, and then
> rewrite the tape driver code to deal with the fact that if you cannot
> open a device, it may really be there, and you should continue trying
> to open it between asking the user to mount it.  This is clearly
> possible.
>
> 2. Consider implementing something in FreeBSD as exists on at least
> Linux and Solaris -- i.e. a means to open the drive and get a valid
> file descriptor.  If you read/write/rewind/... a drive opened and
> there is no tape, it should either return EIO or better ENOMEDIUM.
>
> Comments?
>
> --
> Dan Langille : http://www.langille.org/
> BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference - http://www.bsdcan.org/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-scsi at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-scsi
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-scsi-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>