Forum Discussion

wannawin's avatar
wannawin
Level 6
11 years ago

Tape drives confusion

Hello Team, The st drivers is the OS driver that create drive entries in /dev/rmt . There are 149 device entries under /dev/rmt but when i ran sgscan command then it shows 32 tape deivce entries on...
7.1.x and Earlier
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
Solaris
  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    11 years ago

    @wannawin

    Are you 100% sure that this large number of devices actually exist?

    It seems to be an aweful lot to be attached to a single host.

    When there is no Persistent Binding in place, the target numbers may change when the server is rebooted. The tape drives could then be added with new device addresses, while old entries are left in the /dev/rmt tree.

    Please do the following (procedure is safe because we are only working with symbolic links).

    # cd /dev/rmt
    # rm *
    # devfsadm -C -c tape
    # ls -l *cbn
    # ls -l *cbn |wc -l

Marianne's avatar
Marianne
Level 6
11 years ago

 ls -l *cbn |wc -l 149 

So, you exectuted the last of the commands that I have suggested.

What about these??

# cd /dev/rmt
# rm *
# devfsadm -C -c tape

Ask your Solaris sysadmin. These commands are safe.

It will delete all the symbolic links in /dev/rmt (rm) and then recreate links for only the devices that actually exist (devfsadm). We ensure that only tape devices are scanned for with -C -c tape.

How many tape drives are REALLY in this environment?
There is NO way that any server can actually manage or use 149 tape drives!