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From: lampi@polari.UUCP (Michael Lampi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Exabytes on Series 400's
Summary: Very flaky OS-related issues
Message-ID: <4520@polari.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jun 91 21:22:54 GMT
Organization: R Squared, Redmond, WA (206) 883-3116
Lines: 29

I've been testing Exabyte 8200's and 8500's on various HP/Apollo 9000
Series 4XX's (400t, 425t, etc.) under Domain/OS and (sigh) HP-UX, and have
a couple of observations, and a couple of questions.

First, 8200's work under HP-UX in all cases. No ifs, ands or buts.

Second, 8500's work under HP-UX in all cases IF they have a brand-new firmware
upgrade that just got released last week. Again, no changes required to the
OS and no 3rd-party drivers required.

Third, 8200's and 8500's work under Domain/OS in many cases, but not on a
Mentor node, and tar sometimes has i/o troubles that are bit-pattern specific
that don't occur with wbak or rbak. 

"Not on a Mentor node" means that the
node crashes immediately with status 440002, meaning "bad iova from os/dio
bus manager" when using rbak, wbak and rwmt, but tar, cpio, mt, etc., all
execute flawlessly, and netstat -c reports no tape drives while scsi_info
reports a tape drive at SCSI ID 1.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Any solutions? Any reason why HP has
decided to support 8mm tape drives under HP-UX (or Unix in general) and
not support the Domain/OS utilities?

Thanks in advance.

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Michael Lampi            polari!lampi@sumax.seattleu.edu