stan@wet.UUCP (Stan Osborne) (11/09/89)
In <6440@portia.Stanford.EDU> dave@jessica.Stanford.EDU (David Finkelstein) says: >Howdy. I've got the PCPC Jestream, which is an Exabyte 8mm tape (text deleted) >Has anybody had any success in attaching an Exabyte to the Next? No! Though it appears NeXT knows how to do it. About a month ago I reported our similar lack of success with an Exabyte. Our Exabyte works on a Sun-3/50. We just connect it to the external SCSI interface and the SunOS (4.0.1) sees it as the "st" device. No problems using cpio, dump, or tar. The man pages for the st and xt devices first appeared in 1.0. This gave me hope that one or the other would work with the Exabyte we bought just to backup our NeXT systems. We have 2 660Mb disks on this system and are desperate for our Exabyte to work well enough to do regular backups. In all our 3 NeXT systems have 1.98Gb of hard disk storage that must be backed up to optical disks. A tedious endeavor since multi-volume backup to optical disks is not yet working. Very soon after installing our 1.0 system I tried to use our Exabyte. It appears that at least one problem is the system boot/initialization code does not recognize the Exabyte as an st or xt. It is being set up as the /dev/sg0 (generic SCSI) device. It seems very clear from the xt man pages that neither the st nor the sg device names will work correctly with an Exabyte. None of the 1.0 release documentation mentions the st or the xt device. The only evidence of st/xt support is appearance of the man pages. (Many of the bogus man page files found in the .8/.9 releases were removed for the 1.0 release.) Since the release documents and other documentation makes no mention that these devices are not working or supported and they are new with 1.0, it is clear that this is just one more problem with 1.0. Perhaps these devices worked as documented at one time and were not tested at the time the 1.0 release was fabricated. Or real st/xt support was scheduled for some release after 1.0. The name "Doug Mitchell (dmitch) at NeXT" appears repeatedly in all the /usr/include/nextdev/*.h files for SCSI devices. When I tested our Exabyte and found it not working I sent email to dmitch@next.com. I received no reply, nor did the mail bounce. Doug Mitchell seems to have done a lot of work on SCSI devices at NeXT. Does anyone know if he is still working for NeXT? (The most recent date on a comment with his name was 15-June-89.) If there is anyone who knows how to get an Exabyte to work in 1.0, please tell those of us who really need to use our NeXT's as real computing systems. (Perhaps we should buy a Sun-3/50 to do our backups?) Stan Osborne, Computer Science Department, San Francisco State University Internet: stan@cs.sfsu.edu Usenet: cshub!stan Voice: (415) 338-2168
stan@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Stan Osborne) (11/14/89)
In article <756@wet.UUCP> stan@cs.sfsu.edu I wrote: >In <6440@portia.Stanford.EDU> dave@jessica.Stanford.EDU (David Finkelstein) >says: > >Has anybody had any success in attaching an Exabyte to the Next? > >No! Though it appears NeXT knows how to do it. First many thanks to Bill Barker at University of Washington [<bill@biostr.biostr.washington.edu> (206) 543-7315], who seems to have found what I was doing wrong (and most likely everyone else). "Did you let the Exabyte do its POST before booting the NeXT? (Both Exabyte lights are on when its POSTing, both go out when its finished; if a tape is in the drive, the green light should come on shortly after it finishes POSTing.)" Now we all know how to use an Exabyte tape system. I never tried rebooting the NeXT after the Exabyte was through POSTing. I was shutting down the NeXT, connecting the Exabyte, powering on the Exabyte, then the NeXT. The NeXT would auto-boot long before the Exabyte had finished POSTing. The procedure to follow is to turn on the Exabyte, wait 2 minutes or so for it to finish POSTing, then power on the NeXT system. This procedure does not work when there is a power failure. In that case the NeXT system must be rebooted before using the Exabyte. (Or the power system needs to sequence the power on. Most people don't have this kind of exotic power control for the components of a workstation.) You know when the Exabyte has been seen by the NeXT software if the device "st0" or "st1" is seen during the boot process. Once the system is up access is via the "xt" device (see man "st"). Clearly a sentence or two is needed in the release notes or other documentation before a Businessland Customer will be able to add and use an Exabyte tape system. -- Stan Osborne, Computer Science Department, San Francisco State University Internet: stan@cs.sfsu.edu Usenet: cshub!stan Voice: (415) 338-2168