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From: krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:  SCSI .5" tape drives
Message-ID: <9012061353.AA03233@richter.mit.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 13:53:23 GMT
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The SCSI tape devices on our SR10.2 nodes are /dev/rmts8, /dev/rmts9,
/dev/rmts12, and /dev/rmts13. If I remember correctly, rmts8 and rmts12
are the rewind/norewind devices for SCSI tape unit 0 and rmts9 and rmts13
are the corresponding devices for SCSI tape unit 1. These devices do work
with an Exabyte 8 mm tape drive ... I have tried them with our unit from
Workstation Solutions. However ... some programs such as wbak/rbak and
rwmt do not actually use the device files. They make direct calls to
the low-level tape I/O library. Programs which can direct their I/O to
a device file such as tar, dd, cpio, etc. (and maybe wbak -to/rbak -from ???)
do work with the SCSI tape device files. I really wish Apollo would make
their tape devices more rational and uniform -- they currently have two
incompatible tape device libraries (the old one used by wbak/rbak/rwmt/etc.,
and a new one used by Omniback -- which is the one which supports Apollo's
version of the Exabtye drive), and neither of them is documented so that
you can write low-level tape routines (like, say, a tape-to-tape copy).


 -- David Krowitz

krowitz@richter.mit.edu   (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
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