carroll@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Jeff Carroll) (03/06/90)
I live in a network backwater where all large-scale data xfers take place via sneakernet. These days the primary media are DEC TK50 (for VMS stuff) and QIC tape (for UNIX stuff). I have about 10MB of .tar.Z files which are taking up space on the machine where my email/ftp/news account is located. I have two machines with QIC drives at my site; one is a Tektronix 4337 with whatever drive they use, and the other is an Intel 310 running System V 3.2, with a Bell Technologies drive package (hardware mfr unknown). At the network gateway, they have only 9-track on the primary host (an Ultrix VAX); they have a lot of Suns in the vicinity. First we tried to write everything with a Sun tape drive. The tape was completely unreadable on both of my machines. Next I tried dcp to a VMS host, archive to TK50, load to VAX, binary-mode Kermit to Unix box. Files were mangled beyond uncompress' ability to cope. Next I drove down the street to a colleague's Iris, which is network-connected. This box refused to write anything to my 1/4" tapes. I'm getting frustrated with this. Can anyone recommend a good reading list or reference work on the ins and outs of various makes of QIC tape drives? DETAIL is what I'm after. (I'm an EE, I can handle it.) Why can't I make these machines speak the same language? What I'd really like to do is write a driver which could read the native-mode tape formats of all the machines I deal with. Thanks for any help. Jeff Carroll carroll@atc.boeing.com