When the expander can manage it, shared devices are handled with affiliations. However, the 1068 firmware doesn't seem to be aware of this. It always seems to close connections with CLOSE(NORMAL) instead of CLOSE(CLEAR AFFILIATION). The upshot is that once mptsas sees an ATA device in a shared environment, that device becomes irrevocably (well up until a hard reset) bound to the mptsas initiator ... even if I shut down and power off the box with the mptsas initiator, the expander still remembers it, so no other box can get at the device until they either send a hard reset or the expander gets powered off ... Doug's smp_utils with smp_rep_phy_sata confirms the affiliation. James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html