willis@auvax.UUCP (Tony Willis) (08/28/88)
Hi Netlanders,
I have a Sun 3/160 with Sun OS3.5 which is connected over Ethernet to
a Vax 785 running Ultrix. The Sun itself has no 9-track tape drive but the
785 has a standard DEC tape drive (TU 77?). I need to be able
to use that tape drive with my Sun in order to read and write
large amounts of scientific data on 9-track tapes in a transparent
manner (i.e. the Sun should think it owns the tape drive).
I would assume this kind of setup is far from unique, and that it
must be possible to directly access the tape drive from the Sun.
However, I'm not a real Unix guru, and would appreciate advice
on what system definitions etc. have to be set up in order for
the Sun to access the tape drive.
Thanks for any advice you can give me.
Tony Willis
Athabasca University ...{ubc-vision,ihnp4}!alberta!auvax!willis uucp
Box 10,000 usercdir@ualtamts BITNET
Athabasca, Alberta TOG 2R0
Canada (403) 675-6221 mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) (09/02/88)
In article <711@auvax.UUCP>, willis@auvax.UUCP (Tony Willis) writes: > I have a Sun 3/160 with Sun OS3.5 which is connected over Ethernet to > a Vax 785 running Ultrix. [VAX has a tape, Sun doesn't. Wants Sun > to be able to use the tape drive.] You have several options, of varying degrees of difficulty and utility. The simplest one is probably to use the provided remote tape facilities of /etc/rmt; see the man page for rmt in section 8. This requires recompiling your program to use rexec or rcmd or whatever-it-is to connect from the Sun program to the VAX rmt. (I trust Ultrix provides /etc/rmt.) I also have a library and server you can have which again requires recompiling the program, but it gives better transparency. (There are rmt_open(), rmt_close(), rmt_read(), rmt_write, and rmt_ioctl(), which behave just like the corresponding routines without the rmt_ except that they connect to the server and speak to it. Without /etc/rmt's silly limitations.) If you have no source to your program, and it doesn't provide any way of using an alternate device name, you're out of luck. It would be possible to hack the Sun kernel to create a pseudo-tape device driver which would then connect to the VAX, but that's far from trivial. der Mouse old: mcgill-vision!mouse new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu