Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!lamy
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
From: lamy@cs.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Subject: Re: rtar, rdump on SGI's
Message-ID: <90Feb6.073833est.6187@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
References: <7032@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Distribution: usa
Date: 6 Feb 90 12:38:49 GMT
Lines: 32

pa1081@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (pa1081) writes:

>The question is, does anyone know of a way or public domain routines
>that allow tape operations over the network between SGI Personal
>IRIS's and 4.3bsd systems like the Alliant?  Please let me know....

Tar and friends should be easy, since you can always resort to
tar cf - blah | rsh remote -n 'dd of=/dev/ninetracktape obs=126b'
where the options to dd allow you to byteswap to your heart's content
and reblock to a reasonable size.  Strike one for customer support.

With respect to rdump, the problem is that SGI's file systems are not BSD, so
you need a version of dump that understands EFS.  It is easiest to use a
different output format than the normal 4.3BSD, and have a restore program
that reads that format (the program be compiled on non-SGI machines to restore
SGI partitions elsewhere).  The person who wrote it here mumbled something
about being able to generate straight 4.3BSD format at some cost in
programming and overhead, but his current dump and restore are good enough for
our purposes (a couple dozen diskful machines from n manufacturers dumped over
the net to a pair of exabytes -- heck, even Apple supports rdump :-)

We can't give away what we have here because of the terms of our source
license, but one would hope that eventually SGI will come to its senses
and support what is a common practice in organizations where it is unfeasible
to have "everyone expected to manage their own diskful workstation".  The
official party line appears to be "bru to a private tape drive".  If that's
not what you want, by all means tell SGI.  At least we're not alone :-)

My sinuses are congested and my head is going to explode,

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@cs.utoronto.ca, uunet!cs.utoronto.ca!lamy
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4