Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 00:30:28 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Courtney Thomas" <ccthomas@flash.net> Cc: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: SCSI tape back that works under FreeBSD Message-ID: <005401c177e6$ef983e40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3C03961A.2060109@flash.net>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Courtney Thomas >Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 5:33 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Anthony Atkielski; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: SCSI tape back that works under FreeBSD > >Speaking of Exabyte drives, I [am trying to :-)]use the 8500 [no >compression] but.............. >can't get it to stream, after trying many permutations [and a couple of >days] of possible commands. Oh no, not stop-n-go! >BTW, an Athlon 750mhz w/256MB ram, AHA1520 card. I realize this is a low >end card but it has worked in another machine OK. The drive is almost >unused since new and appears to work satisfactorily other than no streaming. >I've read the dump, st, and buffer man pages and the st page in >particular documents the driver functionality in extremis [for only a >user :-)] nevertheless it is clear that there are many, many >potentially troublesome variables that it seems to me only a proficient >C programmer with lots of time and a real good working knowledge of >things SCSI could probe. Those variables are things that you probably don't need to worry about. >The command I'm using is............... > dump 0ub 64 /<dir> | `buffer -s 16k > /dev/tape` What happens when you try getting rid of the "buffer" and just dumping directly to the device, such as /sbin/dump 0ubf 64 /dev/tape / >Since you use a DAT at home and are familiar with [at least the Exabyte] >8mm drives, hopefully you can point me to a resolution. >Also, since this is a discontinued product, Exabyte is no help, now, >though they were vigorously supportive when I first got the drive. This is an old story, sadly, Exabyte isn't the only one. One thing about the Exabyte 8200's is that they had a series of ROM releases for the drive. Do you have the most current firmware in the drive? You can purchase the latest code for your drive from Exabyte. (or could, at one time) A lot of the 8200 ROM's were custom jobs for icky old AS/400's and other stuff like that and had lots of features lacking, like SCSI-1 only, etc. What's the dmesg output of the system? Anyway, it's quite possible that the AHA1520 isn't to blame, but if it was me I'd pick up a cheap Tekram or other PCI SCSI card and try that. As your no doubt aware your CPU and disk can feed data to the tape drive far faster than the drive can accept it, thus it should never underrun and should stream. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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