hook@geog.ubc.ca (Chris Hook) (06/14/90)
Has anyone successfully tranfered SunOS 4.1 distrubution tape material from the regular Sun 1/4" carttridge format to an 8mm Exabyte type format? I'd apreciate hearing what (if anything beyond the trivial) is involved, and if neccesary, I'll post a summary here. Thanks, Chris Hook hook@geog.ubc.ca
fitz@dirt.frc.ri.cmu.edu (Kerien Fitzpatrick) (06/15/90)
For all those that haven't found out yet (I am believing my FE on this one) - Sun has copy-protected all of their SPARC 4.1 tapes and their 4.0.3c tapes (at least the ones I have). The Field Engineer told me this was done since SPARC was an open architecture and they didn't want their OS illegally copied and run on another SPARC-based machine. I was mildly (understatement) unhappy hearing this. There are some sharp programmer types at Sun - why couldn't they come up with a scheme that would not shaft their CUSTOMERS [remember us - we paid for your hardware & software and now you make life inconvenient]!!! Seems to me there a couple of unique id's - ethernet & host. Now another manufacturer can copy the hostid, but the enet would be a risky copy. OK, so maybe my proposed scheme is tougher to implement. If someone wants to copy your software - what is to stop them from cloning an installed disk. This still works quite well. I apologize for the flame, but it always irritates me that major companies choose to inconvenience their customers instead of expending more effort to aviod that inconvenience. What can we expect next? ********************************** Disclaimer :: all flames are my own......my employer may not agree, but I would bet at least a few people out there agree on this one. ********************************** Kerien Fitzpatrick Field Robotics Center The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412)268-6564 Internet: fitz@frc2.frc.ri.cmu.edu
katz@rpal.com (06/15/90)
In article <8853@brazos.Rice.edu> hook@geog.ubc.ca (Chris Hook) writes: > > Has anyone successfully tranfered SunOS 4.1 distrubution tape material > from the regular Sun 1/4" carttridge format to an 8mm Exabyte type format? > I'd apreciate hearing what (if anything beyond the trivial) is involved, > and if neccesary, I'll post a summary here. > I have not done the transfer you mention, but I did once create 1/2" 3.5 tapes from 1/4" 3.5 tapes. There are basically two problems which must be overcome: 1) Sun places a proprietary header at the beginning of the tapes (as the first file) which is different for each type media. I do not know whether SunInstall currently checks this file to verify it or just skips over it. 2) The second file is a directory of the files which appear on the given tape. It is used by suninstall to decide when to tell the user to switch tapes. This directory is just ascii so you can rebuild a new single directory from the directories of the various 1/4" tapes for the 8mm. The other files on a distribution tape other than the header file, the directories, and the various utilities like diag, miniunix, etc. are just tar files. If you are a bit of a hacker and are willing to install a machine without using sun Install, you can just untar the various parts of the OS by hand while running mimiunix. Morry Katz Rockwell Science Center administrator@rpal.com (machine administration issues) katz@rpal.com (other)