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From: stan@wet.UUCP (Stan Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Help with Next and Exabyte
Summary: NeXT Computer Systems Can't/Should Write Tapes
Keywords: SCSI, tape, Exabyte, backup
Message-ID: <756@wet.UUCP>
Date: 9 Nov 89 10:23:35 GMT
References: <6440@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: stan@cs.sfsu.edu (Stan Osborne)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 56
Sender:

In <6440@portia.Stanford.EDU> dave@jessica.Stanford.EDU (David Finkelstein)
says:

  >Howdy.  I've got the PCPC Jestream, which is an Exabyte 8mm tape
   (text deleted)
  >Has anybody had any success in attaching an Exabyte to the Next?

No! Though it appears NeXT knows how to do it.

About a month ago I reported our similar lack of success with an Exabyte.

Our Exabyte works on a Sun-3/50.  We just connect it to the external
SCSI interface and the SunOS (4.0.1) sees it as the "st" device.
No problems using cpio, dump, or tar.

The man pages for the st and xt devices first appeared in 1.0.  This
gave me hope that one or the other would work with the Exabyte we
bought just to backup our NeXT systems.

We have 2 660Mb disks on this system and are desperate for our
Exabyte to work well enough to do regular backups.   In all our 3
NeXT systems have 1.98Gb of hard disk storage that must be backed up
to optical disks.  A tedious endeavor since multi-volume backup to
optical disks is not yet working.

Very soon after installing our 1.0 system I tried to use our Exabyte.
It appears that at least one problem is the system boot/initialization
code does not recognize the Exabyte as an st or xt.  It is being set
up as the /dev/sg0 (generic SCSI) device.  It seems very clear from
the xt man pages that neither the st nor the sg device names will
work correctly with an Exabyte.

None of the 1.0 release documentation mentions the st or the xt device.
The only evidence of st/xt support is appearance of the man pages.
(Many of the bogus man page files found in the .8/.9 releases were removed 
for the 1.0 release.) Since the release documents and other documentation
makes no mention that these devices are not working or supported and they are 
new with 1.0, it is clear that this is just one more problem with 1.0.
Perhaps these devices worked as documented at one time and were not tested 
at the time the 1.0 release was fabricated.  Or real st/xt support was 
scheduled for some release after 1.0.

The name "Doug Mitchell (dmitch) at NeXT" appears repeatedly in all the
/usr/include/nextdev/*.h files for SCSI devices.   When I tested our
Exabyte and found it not working I sent email to dmitch@next.com.  I
received no reply, nor did the mail bounce.  Doug Mitchell seems to
have done a lot of work on SCSI devices at NeXT.  Does anyone know if
he is still working for NeXT? (The most recent date on a comment with
his name was 15-June-89.)
 
If there is anyone who knows how to get an Exabyte to work in 1.0,
please tell those of us who really need to use our NeXT's as real
computing systems.  (Perhaps we should buy a Sun-3/50 to do our backups?) 

Stan Osborne, Computer Science Department, San Francisco State University
Internet: stan@cs.sfsu.edu    Usenet: cshub!stan    Voice: (415) 338-2168