Re: FW: Anyone seen this before?
- From: "Steve M. Fabac, Jr." <smfabac@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:53:29 -0600
D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
Steve. I'm top-posting for brevity.
Tom, Thank you for your suggestions.
Your setup is a bit out of the box, but I'll take a stab at it.
Connecting non-hard drive devices to RAID adapters is something SCO never recommends. It's kind of a crap shoot.
Agreed. The AEC-7720 is not connected to the RAID adapter. It is connected to the
Compaq on board cha wide SCSI controller.
RAID was installed in 2004 via the Adaptec 2110S with two new disks and the single
Compaq disk was disconnected from the cha adapter.
Having said that, it looks like you've got a 50 pin SCSI-IDE bridge attached
to a 68 pin controller, which would require some sort of adapter.
I used the Compaq supplied 68/50 pin adapter I removed from the 50-pin SCSI
tape drive which was removed to accommodate the installation of the DVD drive.
I never did like Compaq's use of the 68/50 pin adapter for its tape drives.
They never provide a 50-pin narrow SCSI connector on their system boards.
But since there are no disks on the cha controller, any bus slowdown caused by
having a 50-pin device on the bus should not cause a performance problem.
Check termination AND terminator power carefully for both the 50pin and 68pin endpoints. Ideally your 68pin to 50pin adapter should be last on the cable and terminate the 68pin side, while the AEC-7720 terminator jumper is enabled for the 50pin side.
I admit that I am somewhat confused regarding the termination on the AEC-7720.
The 68/50 pin adapter is connected to the last connector on the Compaq SCSI cable
next to the cable's integral termination block. I did remove the termination (on/off)
jumper on the AEC-7720 and left the term-power jumper installed. I did not
check to see if the tape drive removed from the system was set to termination
enable.
The Acard AEC 7720U doesn't support SCSI disconnect. When you tickle it with a command, it grabs the bus and doesn't let go until a timeout occurs.
I'm guessing when that happens, the hard drives may think they are "off the bus" and spin down.
There are no hard drives on the cha bus with the AEC-7720.
You may want to try getting a cheap stand-alone SCSI adapter on Ebay just for attachement of the DVD-RAM drive.
I tired the cheap adapter route before on a different customer's
Compaq where I had installed BE and a SCSI REV drive and found that
the cha is wide but not Ultra Wide as required by the REV drive. To
make things worse, the LSI controller I used was seen by the Compaq
BIOS as some defective Compaq controller as the Compaq CHA was based
upon a Compaq specific LSI chip set. We ended up replacing the Compaq
server and moved the LSI controller and SCSI REV to the new system.
You may also try ensuring that the AEC-7720U
is at firmware 6.88, which is the most current, but I'm not sure how much that will help.
We've had mixed results using the AEC-7722 model, but we've never tried it with a RAID adapter.
Tom Podnar
Microlite
------ Original Message ------
From: "Steve M. Fabac, Jr." <smfabac@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 1:31 AM EST
To: distribution@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Anyone seen this before?
I have a client running SCO 5.0.5 Host on a Compaq Prosignia 740 system where I replaced the single hard disk on the cha controller with an Adaptec 2110S RAID controller and a pair of disks (RAID1).
The system has been running fine since the installation of the 2110S in August 2004.
Last week I talked the client into replacing his Cypher QIC tape drive and home brewed cpio backup with a DVD writer and Microlite BackupEdge 2.2.
I had some initial problem with getting Backup Edge to properly recognize the DVD drive. But working with Microlite tech support, we identified an SCO tech article TA105353 that addresses SCSI underrun errors with the Compaq cha driver. Once the changes specified in the article were applied to the SCSI ID assigned to the DVD (the IDE dvd drive is connected with an AEC 7720U SCSI to IDE adapter), Backup Edge was able to auto detect the drive and subsequently backup and verify using DVD-RAM media.
Now the problem: When testing the RE2 disaster recovery CD boot image, I noted that the RAID1 hard disks spin down between operations when booting and performing operations from the RE2 media.
Example: Going to the shell prompt and executing "mount /dev/hd0root /mnt"
results in the disks spinning up, root is mounted, and then the disks spin down.
Subsequently, issuing the command "umount /dev/hd0root" is slow to execute as the disks spin up, hd0root is unmounted, and then the disks spin down. When I exited RE2 (to reboot the machine), the RAID controller message "flushing: 0 1 2.... etc." which normally appears when haltsys or shutdown is executed from the live system, is delayed as the controller waits for the disks to spin back up.
I have never seen this before with Backup Edge RE2 media.
When I sent an inquiry to Microlite tech support, the response was:
I don’t think this is RecoverEDGE related to be honest. We have no code to control the hard drive outside of configuring, mounting, and writing to it.
It sounds like some type of BIOS setting. However, I will pass this over to our engineers to see if they have an opinion.
But since SCO 5.0.5 is obsolete product and Microlite does not list it as supported with BE 2.2, I don't expect any further testing from Microlite.
I am posting this to the NG in the hope that someone had seen this before (disks spinning down) on the Adaptec 2110 controller when cdrom or emergency boot floppy has been booted and can direct me to the appropriate setting to change this behavior.
--
Steve Fabac
S.M. Fabac & Associates
816/765-1670
.
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- From: D. Thomas Podnar
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