Starwind with SCSI tape not available as device

Tape drive and auto-loader redirector over iSCSI

Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)

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anton (staff)
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Wed Oct 06, 2004 9:58 pm

MS guys promised to add buffer control setting long time ago. But still nothing... :-(

2OriginalPoster: I'd try to play with the SCSI card settings. At least Adaptec and Mylex cards allow to alter the buffer size they use. Setting 256K+ buffer size would heal MS iSCSI initiator desease. Rest of the problems seems to be our own ones. We're busy fixing them.
valery (staff) wrote:Steve,

It seems the issue with MS initiator and StarWind is the MS software sends 64K requests to the remote tape device and these requests are failed by the tape device that supports only 60k.
I don't know maybe there is some way to force MS initiator to send requests less 64k...

Pleasew send me the log filewith LogLevel=3 (or it's part if the log is huge) where the *ERROR* message occures.

Thank you.
Regards,
Anton Kolomyeytsev

Chief Technology Officer & Chief Architect, StarWind Software

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Steve Garry
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Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2004 11:50 am
Location: Ashbourne Co Meath Ireland

Thu Oct 07, 2004 9:20 am

Anton / Valery,

Seems youve hit the same block that I have, I can find no way to set anything in the microsoft driver that will allow it to work with the smaller buffer size.

It's beginning to look as if I may not be able to use this concept for the tape drive, as both the card and the device are older technology that well predates the iSCSI concept, so the chances of the drivers being modified to allow the use of these units is probably slim to none. That's a pity, it would have made life a little easier, I guess that I'm going to have to put a larger disc drive on the machine that hosts the tape unit, and use it as a store for the backup images of the other machines and then make sure that they all end up on the relevant tape. Not quite so simple, but that's life with Microsift these days!

Thanks for the help, I will see if I can get more details for you on this, and get a log to you, but I've other things that have to be done at the moment, so I have to slow the progress down a little on this

Regards

Steve
Val (staff)
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Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2004 8:38 pm

Thu Oct 07, 2004 11:00 am

Steve,

I'm sure we'll sort out the tape issue in the nearest future.
So don't hurry to throw out the tape device. ;)

Thank you for your great help in pinning out the problem.

As soon as we fix the issue we notify you and other users.
Best regards,
Valeriy
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