In message 199811130639.WAA15113@tweety.main.gnac.com, Brian Rice writes:

Looks like DLT 4500's are not supported, or at least not by 4.3.4 on F630's . sysconfig -t says "non-qualified tape drive," and one gets no tape devices.

Anyone had any experience to the contrary? I plan to call 888-4-NETAPP and make nice in the morning, but I wanted to find out if anyone has had other experiences, say with later revs of the OS.

I'd rather not run permanently with a non-supported library, even if NAC has a back-door patch for it. I think I need to bite the bullet and buy a real tape drive. But this 4500 (which we found in the tomb of Ramses II, believe it or not) would be a nice stopgap if that were possible.

The problem with the 4500's is that ONTAP looks at the SCSI ID string and barfs if it's not a value it expects. You have two options, get NetApp to give you a "D" release which supports 4500s or change the SCSI ID which your drive returns.

I've tried both. Getting the "D" releases is annoying, they come out at a several week lag to the production release. I managed to get an app from our drive vendor, BoxHill, which allows me to change how the drive reports itself. Now my filer happily writes 40GB to an "Exabyte 8500".

good luck,

jason