Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!eci386!clewis From: clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: Tape cartridge hung Message-ID: <1990Aug14.182748.16325@eci386.uucp> Date: 14 Aug 90 18:27:48 GMT References: <1990Aug2.074751.4386@oct1.UUCP> <8@utekza.UUCP> Reply-To: clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) Organization: Elegant Communications Inc. Lines: 36 In article <8@utekza.UUCP> kevin@utekza.UUCP (Kevin Gribble) writes: > In article <1990Aug2.074751.4386@oct1.UUCP> mason@oct1.UUCP (David Mason) writes: > >In article <1990Jul30.210437.17290@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) > >writes: > %>Is that a tape drive? Early Wangtek 60Mb streamers had some sort of > %>bug in the controller that caused them to hang when used with UNIX > %>or Xenix. Wangtek was shipping 150's for a while for no extra charge. > %Please, tell me more. We have installed a large number of the Wangtek > %60 Mb tape drives over the last few years, and every now and then one > %hangs. The tape stops, the light on the cartridge drive stays on and > %the associated cpio process hangs. Only a reboot clears it. I heard this verbally from the support people for our 386 motherboard (SCI), and since they were quite reliable on other things, I can only assume that this was true. Unfortunately, they didn't isssue a Engineering note on the subject, so I can't give you any other details than that. This was about 1 1/2 years ago, so one would assume that if Wangtek was going to do anything about it, it would have been done by now. Which would explain why replacing your controller with a new one usually fixes the problem. In our case, the whole system locks up. But we waited too long to persue it with our tape vendor, and we still have the one that hangs. Scenario: we do automated nightly backups, designed to write as close to 60Mb as possible. The chance of system lockup appears to be approximately 1 night in 5. If we try doing any substantial tape activity during normal daily loading, the chances of lockup are considerably higher. Since the whole system locks up, there's no way of killing it, so it ain't a defunct process per-se. Further, the exact symptoms of the problem would differ depending on your tape device driver, so I'd imagine our 'ix (1.0.6) would differ from ix 2+ or SCO Xenix/UNIX. -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list Psroff information/questions: psroff-request@eci386