Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!lethe!yunexus!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!sgi!shinobu!odin!anchor!olson
From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: exabyte tape weirdness
Message-ID: <1991Mar1.180719.14958@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 1 Mar 91 18:07:19 GMT
References: <9102282334.AA01973@sand>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Lines: 29

In <9102282334.AA01973@sand> jhp%oasis3@sand.UUCP (Jim Patterson) writes:

| I just installed an Exabyte tape on my PI (4D/25, 3.3.1).  The tape
| came from a 3rd party vendor. It works just fine with all the SGI tape
| utilities (bru, tar, etc).
| 
| I have noticed one very strange thing.  When I read a tape generated
| on two different (non SGI) systems the data comes in byte swapped.
| Tapes that are written on the SGI also appear to be byte swapped on
| the other system.
| 
| Does anybody have any idea what is going on?  Is there some
| configuration switch I need to use to make the tapes compatible
| between the two systems ?

Try man tps MAKEDEV.  One of the advantages of buying from us is that
you get documentation.  We make links to the byte swapping device
by default (ONLY for QIC tapes) to be compatible with the older 68k
machines which had a byte swapping controller.

If you do:
	su; cd /dev; rm *tape*; ./MAKEDEV tps tapelinks
then your /dev/tape will point to the non-byteswapped fixed block
device.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.