How can I tell if the Solaris machine is seeing the hardware on the SCSI bus?

The simplest way to tell if the Sun hardware is seeing the drives is to do a probe-scsi-all at the boot prompt.

This is known to hang the machine on an ultra-based sparc machine. In order to prevent this, make sure that a reset-all is performed first. Always ensure that you perform this after having halted the operating system, or at boot.

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The SCSI bus that I have the CD/DVD recorder connected to is not being seen by the installation scripts.

It may be the case that this is the first time that a device has been placed on the bus. If solaris has not had a reconfiguration reboot (boot -r from the prompt), Solaris may not have created the path along the /devices tree. If this is the case then the K-PAR installation scripts will not find the SCSI bus when it searches for the known bus type in /devices.

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What if I cannot take the system down to load a new password into the kernel after an installation?

It is possible to dynamically load the password into the kernel without the need to reboot. You need to have added the driver into the kernel using the add_drv command, by typing:

The driver module for KPAR_cdr will be loaded using the configuration file /kernel/drv/KPAR_cdr.conf.

If this configuration file is incorrect it may attach to the wrong device and problems may occur. Always check the first time in the system messages that the correct device is being attached to. The password should also be modified in the /etc/system file.

For the CD/DVD-R drivers password to then be loaded into the kernel, you need to type the following:

You will need to rem_drv and then re-add it to reload the updated driver if changing the password.

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Where is the password for the CD/DVD-R device driver held on the system?

The passwords for all K-PAR drivers on Solaris are held in /etc/system.

In order to alter the password after installation you will need to be system user: root

The format that the password line takes is:

The password only gets read from this location at boot, so a reboot will be required to ensure that the password is installed into the kernel. If you cannot reboot the system use kpar_password and then re-load the KPAR_cdr driver.

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Unsupported drives that behave like supported devices.

It is possible that new drives follow the same command set as older drives. This is becoming standard on newer drives that follow MMC compatibility.

With K-PAR's DVDcreation software, it is possible to tell the driver to treat an unsupported drive like one that is already supported. To do this, the /kernel/drv/KPAR_cdr.conf needs to be edited. When this is done the unsupported device will be sent the commands that would be sent to the supported device. This may enable newer drives to function as a basic recorder, but may not enable any vendor specific features that the drive may have.

The KPAR_cdr.conf file should look something like this:

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Problems reading discs in other drives.

It has been noticed that not all CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW media are compatible with all CD/DVD drives. Check with the drive manufacturer or website to find the media that is compatible for the drive. Drive manufacturers regularly update the firmware for their drives, so that the latest CD/DVD media can be used.

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Where to look for errors.

The system log for Solaris is located in : /var/adm/messages

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Why do I keep suffering from buffer underruns?

This means that the data throughput to the drive is not sufficient to ensure a continuous flow of data to write the track.

There are several possible causes for this :

• The SCSI bus may have too many other devices attached to it that need to use the bus too frequently which results in the data flow being interrupted. A CD/DVD-R drive should ideally be on a separate bus from other system devices. If a staging area is being used on a separate hard disk then ideally these should be the only two devices on the bus.
• A system daemon called vold which handles mounting of removable media, may be running on the system and looking at the CD/DVD-R drive. The daemon may try to access the drive to mount it a number of times when the media is placed into the drive. This is likely to cause a burn failure as the bus will be utilized for mounting, and since it cannot mount the CD/DVD as it has no file system on a blank CD/DVD, it will keep failing.
• A heavily utilized CPU may not be able to allocate enough system resources to the burn. In this case try burning the CD/DVD as root, so that a higher priority can be allocated to the burn process.

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Latest patches and updates from Sun.

Useful web sites for Sun Solaris patches include:

• http://sunsolve.sun.com
• http://access1.sun.com

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Latest firmware from manufacturers.

Try following the links to the CD, DVD, Optical or Blue Ray manufacturers' web sites in order to download the latest firmware. Usually the firmware can be found under technical/support/downloads at the manufacturers' web sites.

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Information on file system standards.

A useful web site for Information on file system standards is:

• http://www.osta.org

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