5. Optical jukeboxes

I have no experience with optical jukeboxes with Linux!!!! I have had experiences with Optical jukeboxes under HP-UX. In this setup the the jukebox had a SCSI address of it's own. Each slot in the jukebox had an associated LUN number. A device name was assigned for each disk slot A side and B side. The mount command was run against the appropriate device name. I had a jukebox with just one drive and 16 optical disk slots - 20 Gig. I thought it was going to be a real hassle to write a disk mount manager to share this drive among users until I discovered you can mount as many disk as you want and the jukebox driver takes care of arbitration - what a nice feature. Granted, you only want archive type data here and your overall system configuration to be such that not too many processes will be accessing the jukebox at the same time. The disk spin down, carriage load, carriage move, carriage unload, carriage move to the next disk, carriage next disk load, carriage move, optical drive load, and spin up takes about 12 seconds - "seek-from-hell".

5.1 Maxoptix 520 - Zed Shaw

shawz@imap1.asu.edu

Zed's Origional E-Mail - Feb 13 1998

Hi,
   
I was reading your howto (a life saver, thanks) and I was wondering what
kind of jukebox you were running?  I have a Maxoptix 520 Jukebox (20
disks at 2.6G each, nice!) and I would like to connect it to a Linux box
and serve the drives up to my users, but I'm having problems accessing
the individual drives.   Currently I can only access the two drives and
something called MAXLYB which I think is a controller device of some
sort.
   
Basically, I'm wondering if the jukebox you had was the same or similar
and how you set it up.  I know that you did it under HP-UX, but any help
right now would be nice.  Hey, I'll even let you log into my linux
server if you want to take a look at the jukebox and see what it does.
You can't beat 52Gig of storage!

Anyway, I'd really appreciate your help.


Zed A. Shaw
Application Systems Analyst
Arizona State University

Corrospondance with Zed on Mon, 16 Feb 1998:

> It sounds like your Maxoptix 520 is a jukebox with two physical disk.
Yep, that's the one.

> 
> All jukeboxes have a carriage controller. This is probably your MAXLYB
> device.
> ...

What I've come to find out is that Maxoptix is pretty stingy when it 
comes to drivers.  Apparently, they don't make driver software for any of 
their Jukebox carriage controller interfaces!  I don't know how some of 
these companies stay in business.  I'm going to pester them again soon, 
but you are right, this thing will need a carriage controller driver to 
operate.  The cool thing is that this MX520 (that's the model number of 
the juke) emulates a whole slew of other carriage controllers, so maybe 
one of those other guys has a driver.  I'll be looking into that too.


> 
> You might want to get a-hold of Maxoptix and see if they have a install
> package for your linux kernel version. If not ask them for the programmers
> specification for the carriage controller and maybe we can write one!
> 

Hey, if I can't find any driver software, and I can convince Maxoptix to 
give me the specs, I'd be more than glad to write a driver.  I'd could 
sure use the help too since I haven't got enough time to do it on my 
own.  Also, do you know of anyone else doing this that we might be able 
to hack off of?


> Any information you find, let me know and we will roll the information
> into the Optical HOWTO, acknowledgments of course!
> 

Sure, but let me get some new information first.  So far things are 
looking pretty bleak.

> 
> >Basically, I'm wondering if the jukebox you had was the same or similar
> >and how you set it up.  I know that you did it under HP-UX, but any help
> >right now would be nice.  Hey, I'll even let you log into my linux
> >server if you want to take a look at the jukebox and see what it does.
> >You can't beat 52Gig of storage!
> 
> Nice. At home I can use PPP to mount my 84 platter HP-UX jukebox.
> It's slow though - I wish I had it at home.

Oh, I don't have this thing at home.  There's no way I could afford the 
$30,000 my boss paid for this thing.  But he's stuck with it and has had 
it sitting around collecting dust for a year, so he's letting me play 
with it and try to find a use for it.

I'll get back with you when I have some more information.  It should be 
sometime this week when I find out if I can get it to work or not.

Zed