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Full Discussion: Testing the dds tape drive on AIX
Operating Systems AIX Testing the dds tape drive on AIX Post 302910596 by hicksd8 on Friday 25th of July 2014 02:38:49 PM
Old 07-25-2014
I'm not an AIX expert so I can only answer in generic Unix terms.

The tape drive type you have can be DDS, DDS2 or DDS3. They vary in tape capacity.

If you put a tape in the drive and it immediately ejects it then it's the wrong version.

The tapes are all recognised by the little holes in them so the drive either recognises the tape type or doesn't.

A cleaning tape will be recognised immediately as such, and will invoke firmware on the DDS drive itself and perform a cleaning cycle and eject the tape automatically at the end. Therefore, to answer your first question, there are no commands for the cleaning function. It just does it.

If you enter an ordinary data tape then there are ways to test it directly.

[generic Unix commands]
Code:
 
 cd <any directory>
 tar cvf /dev/rmt0 .

note: on AIX rmt0 may be in a sub-directory of /dev

You could then read the tape back with:
Code:
tar tvf /dev/rmt0

A DDS tape drive knows through internal checksums, etc if it's reading corrupt data so this tape listing will fail if the drive is faulty.

Hope that helps.
Last edited by hicksd8; 07-25-2014 at 03:44 PM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT REDHAT

tapeinfo

TAPEINFO(1)						      General Commands Manual						       TAPEINFO(1)

NAME

       tapeinfo - report SCSI tape device info

SYNOPSIS

       tapeinfo -f <scsi-generic-device>

DESCRIPTION

       The  tapeinfo  command  reads  various information from SCSI tape drives that is not generally available via most vendors' tape drivers. It
       issues raw commands directly to the tape drive, using either the  operating  system's  SCSI  generic  device  (	e.g.  /dev/sg0	on  Linux,
       /dev/pass0 on FreeBSD) or the raw SCSI I/O ioctl on a tape device on some operating systems.

       One  good  time	to  use 'tapeinfo' is immediately after a tape i/o operation has failed. On tape drives that support HP's 'tapealert' API,
       'tapeinfo' will report a more exact description of what went wrong.

       Do be aware that 'tapeinfo' is not a substitute for your operating system's own 'mt' or similar tape driver control program. It is intended
       to supplement, not replace, programs like 'mt' that access your operating system's tape driver in order to report or set information.

OPTIONS

       The first argument, given following -f , is the SCSI generic device corresponding to your tape drive.  Consult your operating system's doc-
       umentation for more information (for example, under Linux these are generally start at /dev/sg0 under FreeBSD these start at /dev/pass0).

       Under FreeBSD, 'camcontrol devlist' will tell you what SCSI devices you have, along with which 'pass' device controls  them.  Under  Linux,
       "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" will tell you what SCSI devices you have.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

       This program has only been tested on Linux with a limited number of tape drives (HP DDS4, Seagate AIT).

AVAILABILITY

       tapeinfo  is  currently being maintained by Eric Lee Green <eric@badtux.org> formerly of Enhanced Software Technologies Inc. The 'mtx' home
       page is http://mtx.sourceforge.net and the actual code is currently available there and via CVS from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mtx/ .

SEE ALSO

       mt(1),mtx(1),scsitape(1)

								    TAPEINFO1.0 						       TAPEINFO(1)
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