[geeks] More Wangtek help

[Tom Manos]

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Jochen said:
For things like this I use maketape.c as found here:
ftp://ftp.teilam.gr/pub/UnixArchive/PDP-11/Distributions/ucb/2.11BSD/
See the end of the HOWTO file for usage instructions.
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Jochen,

Thanks for the pointer, but it solves a different problem than the one I
have. In my case, the SCSI tape driver does not know enough about my drive
to properly stream it, so I was thinking about modifying the st
configuration and building a new kernel.

What I think I will do before I undertake that is to quickly build a simple
Linux box and see if the Linux tape drivers are smarter. If that doesn't
work, then maybe try freebsd,  then back to rebuilding a new SunOS kernel.

BTW, one of the reasons I have to do all this is that I cannot get software
packages, including the Development set, on the box without being able to
create tapes. After that, I should be able to compile maketape, although
it's a bsd'ish program, and I'll be sitting on an ancient SVR3 box.

Mouse, you recommended changing the tape drive's scsi id to 2.

As you might have seen, I got the tape at least running, but not actually
streaming, by doing so.

For making the tape, I'm using a script like:

for FILE in <my list of files> do
   dd if=$FILE of=/dev/nrst0 bs=512
done

and it took over 2 hours to get the first file of 37  (~7000 blocks) on the
tape. It was just seeking back and forth continuously, I'm guessing once per
block. I figured I might kill the old drive trying to make that tape.

So I'll report back after I try Linux.

Thanks for the help and suggestions!

Tom