Mapping Host and STA Drive Identifiers

In STA, tape drives can be identified by drive serial number, World Wide Name (WWN), or physical location within the library. However STA does not know, and cannot display, the logical device ID that a host uses to identify a drive. If you want to map the host drive identifiers to the STA identifiers, you must do this manually.

Mainframe Identifiers

Mainframe hosts use a four-digit hexadecimal drive ID (0000–FFFF) to identify a drive. To map the host identifiers to the STA identifiers, you can use Oracle’s Enterprise Library Software (ELS) Display DRives command on the mainframe host. The IDEntity option lists the mainframe hexadecimal ID, serial number, and WWN for each drive. Following is an example of the command output.

You can issue this command from a variety of locations on the mainframe host, including the operator console or an SMCUUUI utility batch job. Optionally, you can save the output of the command to a.csv or .xml file. See the ELS Command, Control Statement, and Utility Reference manual for complete details about usage, syntax, and options.

Open Systems Identifiers

On open systems hosts (Linux and Solaris), logical device names for tape drives are found in the /dev/rmt directory. To map the host logical names to the STA identifiers, you can do a long listing (ls -l) of this directory. The command output shows the logical device name and the pointer to the raw device file, which includes the WWN for the drive. Following is an example of the output on Linux; the logical device name and WWN for each drive are highlighted in bold type.