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From: peter@citylink.dinoex.sub.org (Peter Much)
Subject: Re: tpqic02: LAST call for help
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Organization: Buero fuer Sektenforschung und Qualitaetspruefung in der Esoterik
Message-ID: <DJo68z.7qH@citylink.dinoex.sub.org>
References: <4a6vve$l46@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu> <RDONG.95Dec8133059@chow.uci.edu> <RDONG.95Dec11113515@chow.mat.jhu.edu> <4anj90$mqa@uriah.heep.sax.de>
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 1995 08:00:35 GMT
Lines: 34
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:13934 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10587
In article <4anj90$mqa@uriah.heep.sax.de>,
J Wunsch <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de> wrote:
>mt status for QIC-02 drives is still unsupported. Anyway, let's face
>it: you don't really need it. :)
It's mostly useless, since it would tell what the driver thinks about
the tape, which is not necessary what is happening with the tape.
On (earlier) Linux, it simply tells nonsense.
>All other commands should work, as long as the underlying hardware
>does support it. (It doesn't support block seeks, nor backward file
You're an optimist.;) I had to change the wt.c file a bit to get it
working in a reliable way:
1. The "mt fsf" command returns immediately, while the tape is winding.
2. The "dd" command reports an error after waiting 60 secs. on the
winding, i.e. blocked, device.
This together makes the tape drive quite unuseable for reliable com-
pressed multivolume tar-archives. (tar cannot do that, one has to
split the input stream into some-MB-chunks and compress the chunks
separately - which is wiser anyway, since a broken tar file can be
recovered more easily than a broken gzip file. To later collect the
chunks back from tape, they need some headers. This gives
mt fsf/dd/mt fsf/dd/... access sequences when appending, searching,
verifying, or after an intermediate retension.)
Since the wt.c file has excellent documentation in it, it is quite
easy to change 1. The original behaviour was designed intentionally,
i have no idea why. I don't know yet what's going on with "dd".
Peter
--
Write to: Peter Much * Koelnische Str. 22 * D-34117 Kassel * +49-561-774961
peter@citylink.dinoex.sub.org * much@hrz.uni-kassel.de