On Mon, 15 Dec 2008, Miles O'Neal wrote:

> We are having a problem with a new SCSI tape drive.
> Overland says we need am stinit.def file, but refuses
> to give us one, saying we need one "from your OS vendor".
>
> Anyone have such a beast laying around?

We have 8 LTO-4 drives (from IBM), and the following definition in
stinit.def has has worked well under SL4 for us.  The device signature for
our drives in /proc/scsi/scsi is:
   Vendor: IBM      Model: ULT3580-TD4      Rev: 7BG2
   Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 03

## stinit.def for IBM tape drives
## General defaults
{buffer-writes read-ahead}

##... a bunch of other old models deleted, not used here

manufacturer="IBM" model="ULT3580-TD4" {
can-bsr scsi2logical drive-buffering two-fms
async-writes=0
timeout=1560
long-timeout=15600
mode1 blocksize=0 compression=0
}


A google search turns up this link, in case it is helpful for you:
  http://otmanix.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/300-008-352.pdf
and it has this section in stinit.def for lto-4:

# IBM ULTRIUM 4
manufacturer=IBM model="ULTRIUM-TD4" {
auto-lock=0
timeout=3600
long-timeout=14400
can-partitions=0
# this gives highest performance, but with old versions of st module it can cause problems with spaning tapes
async-writes=1
# linux does not have full LTO-4 support to set modeline properly (should be 0x46 for LTO4), so use device defaults instead
mode1 blocksize=0 density=0x00
}

cheers, etc.
-- 
deatrich @ triumf.ca, Science/Atlas         PH: +1 604-222-7665
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