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From: phil@cs.wwu.edu (Phil Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: 1/4" SCSI Tape Drives from CSC
Message-ID: <9103060250.AA22134@strawberry.cs.wwu.edu>
Date: 6 Mar 91 02:50:07 GMT
References: <<910305.10201860.074081@L66A.CP6>>
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Reply-To: phil@cs.wwu.edu
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>From Mark_Geisert@L66A.LADC.Bull.COM:
   I would also join a group buy for Archive 2060S SCSI tape drives.
   I'd want one.  I assume that Minix532 would support it, of course.

Well, minix does not support it yet.  I just bought my 60mb tape a
month too soon...  I was looking at the mods needed to get minix to
support a tape drive.  Has anyone else started looking at this job?

So far, here is a small list of changes I think are needed for minix
to suppport the tape drives in a "usual" way:
   a) Add tape scsi commands to the scsi driver. (kernel)
   b) Add knowledge of tapes to fs, including ioctl calls.
   c) Write a version of "mt" (or what every name you want to
      call it) that controls the tape from a command.  (Things
      like rewind, spacing etc. )

One thing I am hoping is that the scsi commands for the different
tape systems are the same.  I presume that that is what scsi is 
all about, but I'm not sure how much vendor specific commands are
needed to run tapes.   My tape drive I just bought is a Wangtek
60mb (QIC-36 interface) driven by an Adaptec SCSI<->QIC-36.  Those
who are interested could work on this problems.

--Phil