3rd party scsi disk support

[George Robert Boyce]

Back on 4/1/90, Vic Abell asked about info on 3rd party disks. In
contrast to the problems with supporting 3rd party 8mm tape drives,
the scsi disk support seems to be pretty good. After solving one
problem (see a related posting), I was able to add an HP 1.2G disk
without any difficulty. I thought it would be useful to share this
information:

tony% df /scratch
Filesystem    Total KB    free %used   iused %iused Mounted on
/dev/scratch    970752  940120    3%      16     0% /scratch

The sequence, while unusual for us BSD hackers, is not hard. I used
SMIT where appropriate but here are the commands which SMIT executes
(for a 3rd scsi disk at address 4 on scsi interface 0, and a
filesystem called /scratch) (oh, and this is from memory):

1. Attach the device at a reasonable scsi address. Note that the
default scsi interface on a rs6000/530 only supports two external
devices.

2. format the drive by runing "diag", select 'service aid', 'disk
media', 'format disk', 'disk drive in location 00-08-00-40'.

3. "mkdev -c disk -t 'osdisk' -s 'scsi' -p 'scsi0' -w '40'"

4. either make a new volume group or extend an existing one, so either
"mkvg -f hdisk2" or "extendvg -f 'rootvg' 'hdisk2'.

5. either make a new file system or extend an old one, so either 
"crfs -v jfs -d'scratch' -m'/scratch' -A'no' -p'rw'" or
"chfs -a size='xxxx' /scratch"

The /usr/lpp/bos/README file (read it) has a few hints including the
command "chdev -l hdisk2 -a pv=clear" command which might be needed
before the mkvg command. I'm not sure because I was having this other
problem at about that time (see related posting).

Other than the format, this procedure takes about 5 minutes and the
system does not need to be rebooted etc. This seems to be one area
where AIX v3.1 is doing something right.

George
--
George R. Boyce, Manager, Systems Support, george at spica.npac.syr.edu
CASE: Computer Applications and Software Engineering Center
NPAC: Northeast Parallel Architectures Center
SCCS: Syracuse Center for Computational Science