More FC2 teething problems (SCSI, sg, OnStream ADR50 tape drives, and Novanet 9)

[Keith G. Robertson-Turner]

Aaarggh.

Just when I thought I'd nailed this FC2 system down, the whole thing goes
pear-shaped.

As I am well aware now, the SCSI subsystem on 2.6.x kernels has changed
radically from 2.4, and this is causing me all kinds of problems.

I have an all-SCSI system (U/160), and since my mobo is 440BX based, I
have no desire to even try to go back to using ATA33.

The big showstopper is the tape drive, an OnStream ADR50, which will not
work with NovaNet unless it is accessed through the sg driver, which
seems broken on 2.6.x. I can access the drive normally using mt, and
backup using tar, but this drive features hardware compression which can
only be activated by certain backup software such as NovaNet, and I really
don't want to lose this feature, since it massively reduces backup time
compared to software compression. Also a have a stack of multimedia data
on tape in NovaNet backups, which can only be restored with that software.

So like the "nVidia" problem that we all know about, this is an +UPSTREAM
issue for NovaStor to deal with. However, unlike hardware accelerated
graphics, I'm afraid I can't do without this feature and just wait for a
fix. Twice in my lifetime so far, I've suffered a "total loss of data"
scenario due to lack of backups, and I swore the last time that it would
never happen again.

The solution? Well I've had to go back to FC1 for now, since I backed up
using NovaNet before upgrading to FC2 (and therefore found myself unable
to restore my /home data files until I went back to FC1).

I guess a mid-term solution would be to plug a 2.4 kernel into FC2 -
apparently there's an article about that somewhere (FedoraNews?).

Long term - I just hope the mess that is SCSI on 2.6.x systems gets sorted
out soon, both at kernel level and userland tools level. E.g. "cdrecord
-scanbus" is now completely BOrken, although I believe there was an update
this week.

I guess it's all part of the price of being an early adopter ... sigh!

-
K.