HP LTO Ultrium 5 tape drives UNIX, Linux and OpenVMS configuration guide (March 2010)

4 Linux servers and workstations
TIP:
Where convenient, do the original install of the Linux operating system with the tape drive attached
to the SAS port, so that the st driver gets loaded with the kernel during boot up. Otherwise, see the
guidelines below for cases where the operating system was already installed without the tape drive
being available.
Ensure the correct HBA and driver are installed
Visit the HP Tape Compatibility website for details of supported Linux OS versions and SAS HBA
controllers: http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/compatibility/tapebackup/index.html
Download and install the latest controller driver from the manufacturer’s website – for example, for
an HP branded HBA, visit www.hp.com to download the latest driver.
Check the driver modules are loaded in the kernel
In order to communicate with a tape device, the operating system needs to have drivers loaded for
both the tape drive and the host bus adaptor. Ensure that both are available as either loadable modules
(for example, usable with insmod and visible with lsmod) or are statically built into your kernel.
NOTE:
To add drivers to the statically-built kernel you need the Linux source code available on disk and
knowledge of how to use the kernel building tools that ship with various Linux distributions. This should
not be attempted by novice users.
The following guidelines assume the use of loadable driver modules.
Run the lsmod command to list all driver modules currently loaded in the kernel. Check whether the
st driver for tape is listed and also whether the relevant HBA driver is listed.
lsmod
For example, the st driver for tape listing would resemble the entry shown below. Also shown below
are two examples of HBA drivers—cciss driver (for HP SmartArray SAS HBAs) and mptsas driver
(for LSI SAS HBA):
Module Size Used by
st 38749 0
.
.
cciss 68484 3
.
UNIX, Linux and OpenVMS configuration guide 17