Tape drive vendor information on Solaris 8

Wednesday, 06. 7. 2006  –  Category: all, sw

An ancient box, groaning under the weight of years of developer abuse, has a failing tape drive. How hard is it to get vendor information out of the OS?

Easy, I thought, just use prtconf and look for the st paragraph:

            st, instance #0 (driver not attached)
                System properties:
                    name <lun> length <4>
                        value <0x00000000>.
                    name <target> length <4>
                        value <0x00000000>.
                    name <class> length <5>
                        value 'scsi'
                Hardware properties:
                    name <inquiry -revision-id> length <5>
                        value '1502'
                    name </inquiry><inquiry -product-id> length <16>
                        value 'MAN3184M SUN18G'
                    name </inquiry><inquiry -vendor-id> length <8>
                        value 'FUJITSU'
                    name </inquiry><inquiry -device-type> length <4>
                        value <0x00000000>.
</inquiry></class></target>

Strange, says Google, I’m sure that’s a disk.

Flail ensues. I’m sure I’ve found this information before, but most leads suggest either dropping to OpenPROM and rescanning the SCSI bus or using some tools inside volume management packages

Turns out iostat -E is our man:


st11     Soft Errors: 7 Hard Errors: 51 Transport Errors: 0 
Vendor: HP       Product: C1537A           Revision: L007 Serial No:   62

iostat goes on to show that prtconf is listing this tape as sd#19 – a disk device! Craziness.

Leave a Reply