[sane-devel] Mandrake 9.1 and ServeRAID 5i

[Raf Schietekat]

Raf Schietekat (that's me) accidentally sent this only to Abel:

> abel deuring wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>> your report sounds indeed quite nasty...
> 
> 
> As you later correct, the problem. :-)
> 
>> [...]
>> well, unless you have indeed a scanner installed on your server. there 
>> is no point to have Sane-related programs installed (scanimage, 
>> xscanimage, saned and sane-find-scanner come to mind -- I can't 
>> comment on any Mandrake-specific stuff, because I have nver used or 
>> installed Mandrake).
> 
> 
> I presume you mean there is no need. The point is probably ease of use 
> (not to be dismissed out of hand), assuming no accidents occur.
> 
>>
>> [...]
>> As already mentioned, I have never worked mit Mandrake, so I can't 
>> make any comment on scannerdrake based on real knowledge of this 
>> program. But I assume that it tries to identify scanners either by 
>> calling the standard Sane programs sane-find-scanner or scanimage, or 
>> it uses
> 
> 
> Comment #6 by Thierry says 'basically harddrake2 uses scannerdrake that 
> uses "LC_ALL=C sane-find-scanner -q"', which led me to come here.
> 
>> [...]
>> Since scanimage may load many backends, and since I haven't read the 
>> source code of every Sane backend, I am not 100%, but "only" 99% sure, 
>> that these backend will not try to work any longer with the processor 
>> devices belonging to the RAID controller. It is highly unlikely that 
>> "IBM YGHv3 S2" is mentioned as the vendor and/or device IDs anywhere 
>> in a Sane backend. Hence it seems that your Raid controller does not 
>> like INQUIRY commands sent too often -- which would be in violation of 
>> the SCSI standard. SCSI devices should be able to respond to a few 
>> commands like INQUIRY and TEST UNIT READY under any circumstances. And 
>> especially these two commands should not alter the state of SCSI 
>> device in any way.
> 
> 
> So is it basically the card's fault? Seems rather a silly defect... I 
> wonder what IBM would say about that.
> 
>>
>> [...]
>> Do you see any messages from the Linux driver of the RAID controller? If
> 
> 
> I have no more information than this, and no real desire to provoke 
> another failure unless I know it will be worthwhile.
> 
>> the controller or the driver becomes confused, file system errors are 
>> unavoidable, I think.
> 
> 
> Hmm...
> 
>>
>> [...]
>> I think it is highly unlikely that a Sane program or backend or this 
>> special Mandrake "scanner search and installation" program is to blame 
>> for your problem. If you need your server up and running quite soon, I'd
> 
> 
> Can you confirm that all that sane-find-scanner does is query the card, 
> with only requests that must be safe according to the SCSI standard?
> 
>> recommend to use another RAID controller. (sorry, I don't have 
>> positive hint for a certain model...)
> 
> 
> That's not a very attractive option. I have run a full diagnostic, but 
> that was IBM's own. Is there another diagnostic that will prove the 
> hardware is the guilty part, without provoking the response "Mandrake is 
> not supported"? Is SANE in Red Hat (which is supported by IBM)?
> 
>>
>> If you want to dig a bit deeper into the problem, you may try to run 
>> this Mandrake scanner installation program with the environment 
>> variable SANE_DEBUG_SANEI_SCSI set to 255. This will produce quite 
>> much debug output (which should probably be sent to an IDE hard disk 
>> on the server or to your notebook, because the file systems on the 
>> RAID array will probably break again). The most interesting things are 
>> the lines like
>>
>>      rb>> rcv: id=0 blen=96 dur=10ms sgat=0 op=0x12
>>
>> "op=..." is the SCSI command code sent to a device. 0x12 is INQUIRY; 
>> 0x00 is TEST UNIT READY; these two commands should not cause any harm 
>> to a decent SCSI device. If you see anything else, we may have found a 
>> bug in Sane.
>>
>> Of course, this test will only make sense, if the Mandrake software 
>> either calls sane-find-scanner or scanimage, or if it uses the 
>> sanei_scsi library.
> 
> 
> I wish I had the time, or a spare test system. Maybe...
> 
> Thanks for the reply,
> 
> Raf Schietekat <Raf_Schietekat at ieee.org>