Thanks to the following responders:
Justin Clift
Grant Lowe
Leonid Kryshov
Hans Schaechl
Reggie Stuart
All provided good common-practice admin advice (which I had tried, but
it's nice to know I was on the right track). boot -r, recreate
/etc/path_to_inst, devfsadm (this is Solaris 8, after all), all that good
stuff.
We have four E220R's. A pair of these each is directly connected to the
tape drives on a Scalar 1000. The connection to the robotics, however, is
routed through a switch. The idea (I guess) was to provide failover
control to the robotics. I stared at this for a while, knew it wasn't "the
problem" but wasn't clear on its purpose. But our setup did not daisy
chain robotics and drives, so that wasn't an issue either.
Be that as it may, only the first server in each pair would make links for
the drives. I trussed drvconfig and devfsadm both to see what was
happening but ran through a blizzard of signal errors that seemed benign,
and decided just to cut through the Gordian knot. So I re-checked the
cabling.
Turns out:
1) The servers connected to ports A and B on each Apcon were not
terminated. Furthermore, all the switch ports were enabled. Apcon
switches, by the way, terminate themsevles on single-ended SCSI. For
differential SCSI interfaces, it's up to you. We terminated, and disabled
switching on all ports except the one talknig to the robotics.
2) Each server pair was attached to the robotics on one Scalar, but to the
drives on the other. Still not the problem, but not useful either. We
corrected that by swapping server connections.
3) Each Scalar 1000 has twelve drives. Two drives each share a chain. We
found the drives using high-number SCSI addresses, which we re-assigned to
0 through 5. Once we did that, all four servers saw drives at the OS
level. probe-scsi-all was fine either way, but Solaris 8 definitely did
not like tape drives at the high addresses.
Finally, we used Veritas' recommended entries in st.conf to talk to the
DLT 8000s.
Another cycle or two of the Scalars, and boom: send the server hardware
guy packing, no one needs him anymore. 8~(
Thanks everyone for the common sense advice and morale support.
Regards,
Michael Ernest
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