IBM Ultrium Model 3580

[Adam Henry <hank@marinar.com>]

I have a Plasmon LTO 10.1 SCSI Tape Library, running with a IBM Ultrium
Model 3580 tape drive, which I have the honor of configuring under
Linux.  While it may be more appropriate of me to post this question
to a SCSI forum, I wanted to gain the insight of those here who may
have worked with this device in the past.

Writing using tar seems unreliable.  The first several writes/reads worked
fine, but after awhile I get this error when writing to the beginning
of tape:

	Jul 16 13:55:10 ma-bell kernel: ASC=4b ASCQ= 0

	Jul 16 13:55:10 ma-bell kernel: Raw sense data:0xf0 0x00 0x0b
	0x00 0x00 0x00 0x1e 0x1c 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x4b 0x00 0x00 0x00
	0x10 0x51 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20
	0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00

	Jul 16 13:56:32 ma-bell kernel: st0: Error with sense data:
	Current st09:00: sns = 70  5

When running 'mt-st reten' I get this error:

	Jul 16 13:56:32 ma-bell kernel: ASC=24 ASCQ= 0

	Jul 16 13:56:32 ma-bell kernel: Raw sense data:0x70 0x00 0x05
	0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x1c 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x24 0x00 0x00 0xc8
	0x00 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20
	0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00

The software page of the plasmon only mentions vendors such as Arkeia
and Computer Associates for supported software.  I am not so
interested in getting the Robot working as much as just having the
ability to write to tape.

I greatly appreciate any advise.  Could anyone also recommend a good
SCSI-related mail list or newsgroup in which this question would be
better suited?

thanks,
hank