mt refuses to report location on the tape

[Herta Van den Eynde]

On 22/07/07, Anthony Reynolds <rar at ctscan.co.uk> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
>
>
> This is a follow-on to a previous posting as we have encountered the exact
> same problem with RHEL ES4:
>
>
>
> We attached a Quantum 8000 DLT to an Adaptec 39320A SCSI controller - the
> tape drive works fine, tar works fine and most of the mt commands work fine
> except
>
>
>
> mt -f /dev/nst0 tell
>
>
>
> which comes back with "no such device".
>
>
>
> Everything works fine on an older RH Linux system.
>
>
>
> If anyone knows the solution to this problem on RHEL 4 we'd be very
> grateful.
>
>
>
> Kind regards
>
>
>
> Anthony Reynolds
>
>
>
> Image Diagnostic Technology Ltd
>
> London, England
>
>
>
>
>
> ====================================================
>
> Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 11:24:14 -0500
>
> To: redhat-list at redhat.com
>
>
>
> I have a RHEL WS 4 Update 1 machine with a DLT drive attached. A user
> wants to use it, but is encountering some weird behavior from mt.
>
> The device shows up in dmesg, the module is loaded, and /dev/st0 and
> /dev/nst0 exist. tar -tvf will successfully list the contents of a tape
> in the drive. However, 'mt -f /dev/nst0 tell' fails with 'no such
> device'. Normally I would suspect that the tape drive doesn't have this
> capability, but this command worked just fine with the machine's former
> Redhat 7.2 install. mt's other functions, including rewind, etc. appear
> to be working fine.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> -Mindy
>

Re:
> Normally I would suspect that the tape drive doesn't have this
> capability, but this command worked just fine with the machine's former
> Redhat 7.2 install.

Slightly ambiguous.  Was that the same tape drive that was attached to
the server?

According to the man pages, tell "is available on some Tandberg and
Wangtek               streamers and some SCSI-2 tape drives"  No
explicit reference to Quantum 8000 DLT.

Just in case, have you checked for firmware upgrades?

Kind regards,

Herta