ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) (12/13/87)
Well, after six months of trying to work out a fix with Emulex, I've given up. Be warned: if you buy an Emulex TC7000 tape controller and a Cipher M990 tape drive for your VAX running 4.3BSD, the controller will hang (and be unusable until you reboot the computer) if the M990 ever displays its "WRITE RETRIES EXCEEDED" message. This is true even if you upgrade to Cipher's new "Revision Level 7" firmware. If you've got source code, you can patch the tape driver to abort the transfer if a write fails to complete in timely fashion (as we've done here at elsie); if you're on a binary-only system, you're out of luck. So much for fact. As for my own personal opinions: I feel I received abysmal "support" from Emulex; I'd advise you to get your equipment from companies other than Emulex and Cipher. -- ado@vax2.nlm.nih.gov ADO, VAX, and NIH are Ampex and DEC trademarks