Solaris

Can I do this live? Or, do I need to do a probe-scsi-all after doing a stop/A?

The official procedure is to do a reconfiguration reboot. probe-scsi-all is a diagnostic tool. By doing it "live", do you mean that the box is running sunos and you added the tape drive without taking the box down? I always shutdown to add hardware and "boot -r" on the way back up. But if you added the drive and don't want to reboot, there may be a way. First make sure that prtconf can see the drive. If so, I think that one of following two sequences of commands might do it, but I'm not sure which. I would not experiment on a system that a care about, but maybe you'r bolder than me. The sequences in the order that I would try them are:

drvconfig
tapes

and

add_drv
tapes

If you try them, let me know if they worked or not. And if they trash your system, let me know how bad the damage was.

hiho,
if you are using solaris 8 or earlier use Perderabos answere, drvconfig;

if you are using solaris 9 you could use devfsadm

# man devfsadm

DESCRIPTION
devfsadm(1M) maintains the /dev and /devices namespaces. It replaces the previous suite of devfs administration tools including drvconfig(1M), disks(1M), tapes(1M), ports(1M), audlinks(1M), and devlinks(1M).

The default operation is to attempt to load every driver in the system and attach to all possible device instances.
devfsadm then creates device special files in /devices and logical links in /dev.

*The official procedure is to do a reconfiguration reboot.*
sorry, that's not my opinion, solaris is using an full dynamic kernel (that's no bug, that's a feature!) and full reconfigureable processes.
# man path_to_inst
This file is read only at boot time, and is updated by add_drv(1M), devfsadm(1M) and drvconfig(1M)

be happy using an windowless OS... suns big maschines are also able to rebind whole processor boards without an reboot.. Downtime costs money!

greetings Preßy

I've done the boot -r and the probe-scsi-all and it will not recognize the new tape drive. I've updated the patch as the documentation suggests, so that part is OK. I've got it plugged into a dual channel scsi card and it sees the external drive array, but not the tape drive. THe new tape drive is a Sun LTO-2 drive attaching to a Sun Blade 150. Any other suggestions?

If probe-scsi-all doesn't see the device, my guess is that you have a hardware problem of some kind. I'm just a software guy. I can check the cables and be sure that it's powered on, but that's about it. My boss would smack the drive a couple of times to see if that helps. He actually has some success with that...

You need the patch # 112697-03

and aslo QUS QUS drivers, which can be downloaded from the Sun download centre for the LTO-2 tape drive

Also, you need to reboot the system as per patch/driver requirements.