stanonik@nprdc.arpa (01/14/87)
Hello, We've had several crashes recently while trying commit unnatural acts with a tape drive. The unnatural acts consist of trying to recover data past the logical end of tape (two eofs) and trying to recover data from tapes lacking any eof. We get a hard error on the drive, and then panic with either a segmentation or protection fault. We expected the hard error (because the drive suddenly finds itself in the midst of a tape record without seeing some appropriate preamble), but we didn't expect the panic. We thought the drive would find the next interrecord gap, and reading would resume. At any rate, our configuration is a vax 780 running 4.3bsd. The drive is a kennedy 9400 connected to an emulex tc7000, which is plugged into an emulex v-master on the sbi. The fault seems to occur in htustart when retrying the operation, as though htustart was passed a (partially?) bogus mba_device. Panic'ing due to a tape error seems a bug. Anyone dealt with this? Thanks, Ron Stanonik stanonik@nprdc.arpa
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (01/17/87)
> We've had several crashes recently while trying commit unnatural > acts with a tape drive. The unnatural acts consist of trying to > recover data past the logical end of tape (two eofs) and trying to > recover data from tapes lacking any eof... > Panic'ing due to a tape error seems a bug... Such bugs are endemic in Unix tape drivers. Very few of them react well to really strange situations on the tape, although panicing is indeed a bit extreme... -- Legalize Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology freedom! {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry