Tape Drive won't show up on RHEL3 / kernel 2.4 Linux (79878)

Date - JAN 2010
Affected Product & Version - NVBU 8.5
Affected Module & Version - N/A
OS Version – RHEL 3, 2.4 Linux kernel
Application Information - N/A


Symptoms:
Tape Drive won’t show up on RHEL3 server.

In RHEL3 and other Linux distributions that use version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, there is no way to tell what devices are actually connected, so /dev is populated with all devices you should need. For SG devices it creates sg0-sg31. If you have a large number of devices which the server can see, it may actually require a higher sg device than sg31. To see if this is the problem type:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

If the tape drive shows up in this output as the 33rd or later device, you will need to create the appropriate sg device. Here is an example of a command to create devices sg1-sg99.

sudo bash -c 'for i in $(seq 1 99); do mknod /dev/sg$i c 21 $i;done'