stan@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Stan Osborne) (10/16/89)
We bought an Exabyte (2.4Gbyte 8mm tape) to backup our 2+ Gbyte disk space on systems in our departmental network. 1.8Gb is from our NeXT systems. (We would need 10 flopticals per full backup, 10 x $50=$500; only one 8mm tape is needed; the 8mm tape cartridges are $8 each. Exabytes are easily cost justified, especially when your alternative is a 250Mbtye NeXT floptical.) The Exabyte drive was tested on a Sun-3. We plug it in the SCSI daisy chain, and use it as the "st" (streaming tape) device. On NeXT .9 with the Exabyte the system would boot and the 8mm would become "sg0", but tar and dump would fail trying to open this device. (The Exabyte drive has internal termination.) On 1.0 there are both "st" and "xt" devices. (See "man 4 st".) The man page for the "st" device claims that the "xt" device is a speical case to handle special initialization problems. The 1.0 man page for the "st" device specifically mentions the name "Exabyte" in many places when talking about the "xt" driver. Well yesterday I powered down the 1.0 system, plugged in the Exabyte, and then rebooted. The system still called the 8mm drive "sg0", when I had expected it to be "xt0". When I tried to tar out a directory of files to /dev/rsg0, the lights on the Exabyte flashed a bit and then tar gave an error message saying it could not write to the device. This was more promissing behavoir. Now if there were a way for the startup code to recognize the drive as "xt0" instead of "sg0", it might work as I had hoped it would. Since the "xt" device did not exist in .9 and it is now in 1.0, I had great hopes that it also worked correctly. This is apparently not the case. If anyone has had more success with an Exabyte on a NeXT 1.0 system, or knows what I am doing wrong, I would greatly appreciate hearing from them. PS: I looked all through the documentation for references to SCSI and many other related keywords. I did not find anything useful. -- Stan Osborne, Computer Science Department San Francisco State University, California Internet: stan@cs.sfsu.edu uucp: cshub!stan Voice: (415) 338-2168