[daip] adding DAT tape drive to AIPS

[Patrick P Murphy]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:41:40 -0700, Eric Greisen <egreisen at nrao.edu>
   said: 

> marrj at union.edu writes:

>> I am about to buy a DAT tape drive (HP DAT 40--compatible with
>> DDS2,3,&4), to put onto my AIPS (on a linux machine).

> I was going to suggest the AIPS Manager FAQ page but even it says
> little:

> Edit the file

> $AIPS_ROOT/DA00/TPDEVS.LIST

> A typical entry from our file is

> ALCOR      /dev/nst0         Exabyte 8500 (dual density)
> ALCOR      /dev/nst1         DAT

> where ALCOR is the host name to which the tape device is attached.

> The operating system tells AIPS software what type of device it is and
> AIPS should be able to handle things just fine.  Of course, your Linux
> must have the right driver for the device and that can sometimes be a
> problem - Linux is often behind the development of new devices.

I would strongly recommend making sure you get a SCSI based tape unit
which may require getting a SCSI card.  A quick glance at one of our
high end linux systems that has DDS tape drives shows it has both an
Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 and Adaptec aic7892 Ultra160 adapter (one is used
for disk, one for tape, just to keep the data paths more efficient).  

It is possible to get a DDS drive for a PC without it being SCSI, but I
don't think anyone at NRAO has done this.  SCSI for tapes is the way
that seems to work well for us.

Hope this helps.
				- Pat
-- 
 Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.              Division Head, CV Computing, NRAO
 NRAO Computer Security Manager        Head, NRAO Webadmin Working Group
 Home: http://goof.com/~pmurphy/     Work: http://www.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
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