Upgraded to 6.5 sp8 nwtape.cdm tape drive seems to hang when accessed

  • 7003771
  • 06-Jul-2009
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 8
HP Data Protector tape backup software
Tape Drive  msl2024

Situation

Things worked fine until the server was upgraded to support pack 8.  Then when the tape drive was accessed via the tape software it hung. There were no errors of any kind. It was found that if nwtape.cdm was removed from the startup.ncf file, and loaded manually after the server came up, everything worked fine. If nwtape was loaded in the startup.ncf file again, the problem returned. This was also true when loading it in the autoexec.ncf file as well. The tape drive appeared to stay in its ready state though once a command was sent to it ie: a load a tape command, it it loads the tape but then just stays idle. The tape software ( HP Data Protector) reported the drive as locked.

Resolution

Adding the switch
gtaggs=off
to the lsimptnw.cdm load line in the startup.ncf file resolved the issue.

Note that this may be related to the load/unload problem with nwtape.cdm discussed in KB 7002947 . In general this generic tape driver should not be loaded unless actually required by the backup software; most commercial backup products come with their own tape drivers so use of the Novell generic driver is unnecessary. See that TID for how to prevent it from loading automatically.