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From: thompson@PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM (John Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: re: Apollo SCSI and tape drives
Message-ID: <9005311812.AA19330@umix.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 31 May 90 17:50:32 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
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> On a 10.1 system with no patch tapes, no extended software, etc Can a
> 8mm type scsi drive be used? The scsi hardware is there.  
Not as far as I'm aware.  The scsi drivers were on psk4 (??) and then
incorporated into sr10.2.  The fact that the scsi controller is present 
doesn't help you.

> The question
> is is Apollo's handling of tape related scsi standard enough for the
> drive to function with reasonable capacity?  I only need to run rbak,
> and wbak...
Unless I'm (again) wrong, you wouldn't be able to run r/wbak to the scsi
drives even WITH the appropriate drivers.  On our systems (10.2 and 
10.1 w/ psk-whatever), we still cannot use r/wbak.  The documentation
states that you won't be able to (what -dev would you try?).  Attempts
to back up to a "file" /dev/rmts8 fail with some error (I forget which).
Unix 'tar' works, and Omniback does, of course, but I'm not aware of any
other supported s/w for read/write to SCSI.

As a BTW:  You do _NOT_ need to buy Apollo's 8mm drive.  We get along
just fine with straight ExaBytes (purchased from 3rd-party supplier).

John Thompson
Honeywell, SSEC
thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com
thompson@animal.ssec.honeywell.com