tim@csc-lons.arpa (Tim Dennison) (08/23/88)
We here at CSC have a VAX 8550 running Ultrix 2.2 (soon to be 2.3). We also have an 8650 running Ultrix 2.0. On the 8650 we have two US Designs Corp. disk drive systems. We have been very pleased with the quality of the drives and so decided to buy one for the 8550. The drive systems can hold up to four devices in a box about 1/2 the height of an RA8x. Four devices being up to 3 disk drives and one tape drive, and the disk drives can be up to 750 Megabytes apiece. Now to my problem. With the system for the 8550 we purchased an 8mm, 2 Gigabyte tape drive. The tape drive is apparently an Exabyte (did I spell that correctly??) drive. I installed it and rebuilt the kernal. The system recognizes the drive and will let me tar or dump to it. My problem occurs when I try to dump a large file system to tape. The controller card resets itself repeatedly until the system crashes. My understanding from what I can decypher from DEC and US Designs is that the operating system expects the tape drive to respond faster than it does. I also understand that there is some way to set the timeout parameter in the system. I wonder if anyone has run into this or a similar situation and/or if they know how to set the timeout parameter. Thank you in advance for any information you might provide me. You can respond to me directly and I will compile a response from what I receive. Tim Dennison Testbed Manager Computer Sciences Corp. tim@csc-lons.arpa Voice (703) 876-1313