Here's one from the land of obscurity:
We're running a 1GHz G4 XServe and have been reliably using a combination of Retrospect 6 and a VXA-1 tape drive for client backups across the network for the past three years.
Earlier this year, we started having problems with the VXA being seen by Retrospect. It would show up in the system profiler, but Retrospect wouldn't recognize the drive or tape media. Did the usual stuff: updated the VXA's firmware, updated Retrospect, and updated Panther Server to try and fix the problem. Nada results.
We've tried the VXA in every FireWire port on the XServe (two back, one front on this model) with the same problems. Thought maybe it was a problem with the XServe's FireWire bus, but it works with other external FireWire devices with no problems.
Started doing desperation Google searches, and came across several threads that indicated problems with FireWire VXA drives and Retrospect 6 that seemed to begin around 10.3.6. Dantz claims these were fixed, Apple says it's not their problem, and Exabyte doesn't provide anything but firmware updates.
Finally, on another Google desperation search this morning, I stumbled across a random posting from someone who said they couldn't get Retrospect to recognize the VXA drive if it was plugged directly into an iMac's FireWire port, but when the VXA was daisy-chained off of a powered external hard drive Retrospect found it with no problems.
So, I took an external FireWire drive we had lying around, powered it up, plugged it into our XServe and daisy-chained the VXA from the repeater on the back of the FireWire drive. Wouldn't you know it, suddenly Retrospect can see, read and write to the VXA with no problem.
What's going on here? Has anyone else ever encountered this before?
Bueller? ... Bueller? ...
We're running a 1GHz G4 XServe and have been reliably using a combination of Retrospect 6 and a VXA-1 tape drive for client backups across the network for the past three years.
Earlier this year, we started having problems with the VXA being seen by Retrospect. It would show up in the system profiler, but Retrospect wouldn't recognize the drive or tape media. Did the usual stuff: updated the VXA's firmware, updated Retrospect, and updated Panther Server to try and fix the problem. Nada results.
We've tried the VXA in every FireWire port on the XServe (two back, one front on this model) with the same problems. Thought maybe it was a problem with the XServe's FireWire bus, but it works with other external FireWire devices with no problems.
Started doing desperation Google searches, and came across several threads that indicated problems with FireWire VXA drives and Retrospect 6 that seemed to begin around 10.3.6. Dantz claims these were fixed, Apple says it's not their problem, and Exabyte doesn't provide anything but firmware updates.
Finally, on another Google desperation search this morning, I stumbled across a random posting from someone who said they couldn't get Retrospect to recognize the VXA drive if it was plugged directly into an iMac's FireWire port, but when the VXA was daisy-chained off of a powered external hard drive Retrospect found it with no problems.
So, I took an external FireWire drive we had lying around, powered it up, plugged it into our XServe and daisy-chained the VXA from the repeater on the back of the FireWire drive. Wouldn't you know it, suddenly Retrospect can see, read and write to the VXA with no problem.
What's going on here? Has anyone else ever encountered this before?
Bueller? ... Bueller? ...