wojtowic@fletcher.cs.unca.edu (David Wojtowicz) (04/09/91)
I've seen lots of requests for information about getting a CMS tape backup to work with ISC or ESIX. It seems that many are looking for the necessary drivers. Of course, as far as I know, the only answer to that is to buy it from CMS for $$$. Of those of you who did break down an purchase the driver, has anyone managed to get everything to work right and successfully back up their system? For those who are considering the purchase...here's our story... Not wanting to see the tape drive we had purchased go to waste we broke down and ordered the driver to use on our DTK386 running ESIX 5.3.2. (tape drive is the JUMBO type) Installation proceeded smoothly with installpkg but what it installed wasn't much good. We encountered a number of problems: The fancy jtape (the backup/restore program) opening screens and menus turn into garbage on the display if you're not using an 8 bit tty. The program uses the function keys for everything which, in my opinion, is DUMB because the escape codes that the function keys send varies a great deal from terminal to terminal. It turns out that it doesn't recognize the escape codes ESIX assigns to the console F-keys. (CMS support...after 20min of "operators are busy" recordings...thought it was the strangest thing they'd ever heard of. They said I must have installed the hardware improperly. And its effecting my F-keys?? Right.) After some experimentation, I discovered the set of escape codes it was expecting and managed to navigate through the menus by typing the escape codes myself...not very convenient. I did manage to format the tape and make a backup. Great I thought. I guess I can live with the F-key problem. However...I decided to make sure the backup could really be used if necessary so I deleted some directories that weren't too important from my account and tried to restore them from the tape. That went fine too until I did a ls -l on them. The owner and group for each file were set to random UID's and the file attributes like read and write were also random. After triple checking everything and trying again twice I got in line at CMS support again. After they suggested that I may have overlooked something in the setup they finally asked what software version I had. They said OH! you have version x.y.z. It had a bug that messed up file permissions. I'm sure I mentioned the version the last time I spoke with them and they hadn't mentioned the bug. They offered to Federal Express the latest version which they did. The next morning I cheerfully installed the new version thinking that my troubles were over. This time though, on the test restore it was unable to read any thing off the tape further than about halfway through the backup (not halfway though the tape since it makes multiple passes on different tracks). It just said read error after the name of every file after the first 30MB or so had been restored. (This story is getting long I know so I'll try and hurry) CMS support said the head was dirty...The drive was brand new and the head was shiny clean. The tape was bad?...same thing on a different length tape from a different manufacturer. They offered to exchange the drive which they did but failed to return a cable or two that I packed back with the original drive. Also, the new drive was a different model from the one I sent back. After all of that...still have the same problems. I've also tried tar and backup (which uses cpio) both of which have to talk to it trough the CMS driver. They both have similar read error problems. The final CMS support conclusion..."Hmmm...Umm...We don't support ESIX." They hadn't mentioned this before. I still don't have a backup thats good for anything unless what needs to be restored is on the first part of the tape. I give up! Several hundred dollars of hardware and software and many hours of frustrating trouble shooting and nothing for it. OK...maybe I'm being far too negative here. To be fair... Has anyone gotten a CMS hardware/software setup working to their satisfaction on sysv386? I'd love to know about it. David Wojtowicz | wojtowic@cs.unca.edu Atmospheric Science Dept. | atmsci@unca.bitnet UNC-Asheville |
kentkar@shambala.uucp (Kent Karrer) (04/10/91)
In article <1991Apr9.021529.22091@rock.concert.net> wojtowic@fletcher.cs.unca.edu (David Wojtowicz) writes: >I've seen lots of requests for information about getting a CMS tape backup >to work with ISC or ESIX. It seems that many are looking for the necessary >drivers. Of course, as far as I know, the only answer to that is to buy >it from CMS for $$$. > >Of those of you who did break down an purchase the driver, has anyone managed >to get everything to work right and successfully back up their system? > I originally tried using my CMS Jumbo with the floppy tape driver provided with my ISC 2.2 unix system. I could never get it to work. I always received device busy errors. I finally called CMS tech support. They had me check the hardware rev of the Jumbo drive. They told me that the rev I had was not compatible with ISC's floppy tape driver. I finally purchased their unix driver. The CMS driver and related software works great. I made complete system backups and on two occassions had to rely on those backups because of problems I created when fooling around with my hard drive. >We encountered a number of problems: > > <lots of stuff deleted> I did not experience any of the problems that you have. I am curious though about the floppy controller you are using. Originally, I had my CMS Jumbo cabled to my B drive port on my WD1006V-SR2 hard/floppy disk controller. I had to specify in my CMOS PROM setup that there was no device on B. Trying anything else was unsuccessful for me. Additionally, I finally decided to purchase CMS's FC-10 Jumperless Tape controller as I wanted to have my 3.5" floppy back as drive B. Installation of the FC-10 went fairly well and I have been very satisfied with it also. So, bottom-line, there's at least one satisfied CMS customer out here.
kayvan@satyr.UUCP (Kayvan Sylvan) (04/11/91)
In article <1991Apr9.021529.22091@rock.concert.net> wojtowic@fletcher.cs.unca.edu (David Wojtowicz) writes: OK...maybe I'm being far too negative here. To be fair... Has anyone gotten a CMS hardware/software setup working to their satisfaction on sysv386? I'd love to know about it. Just return the drive and get a Wangtek or Archive. ---Kayvan -- | Kayvan Sylvan Consulting/Training 879 Lewiston Drive | | Sylvan Associates Unix and Mac Programming San Jose, CA 95136 | | "Think Globally, GNU tools, GUIs, Databases (408) 978-1407 | | Act Locally." Unify User's Group Librarian apple!satyr!kayvan |
howardl@wb3ffv.ampr.org ( WB3FFV) (04/12/91)
From article <KAYVAN.91Apr10122500@satyr.UUCP>, by kayvan@satyr.UUCP (Kayvan Sylvan): > In article <1991Apr9.021529.22091@rock.concert.net> wojtowic@fletcher.cs.unca.edu (David Wojtowicz) writes: > > OK...maybe I'm being far too negative here. To be fair... > Has anyone gotten a CMS hardware/software setup working to their > satisfaction on sysv386? I'd love to know about it. > > Just return the drive and get a Wangtek or Archive. Hello All, I think this is selling CMS a little short, I generally prefer to use the Archive drives as they seem to be darn quick (at least under UNIX V/386), but that dosen't mean the CMS drive is junk! I had a client that was using MS/DOG on there 80386 system and had the CMS Jumbo-40/60 drive which actaully worked well for them. At some point they decided to go to UNIX, so I installed Interactive 2.2 what was supposed to support floppy tape backups. I found as I am sure many others have that the supplied driver (by Interactive) was worth a hoot. At that point I contacted CMS and purchased the driver that had avalible. This driver installed without any trouble, and has been running fine ever since. One nice thing about the CMS driver is that it uses the same menu interface that the user was used to under DOS, so there was NO learning curve. The moral of this story is, the CMS tape units work fine if you are willing to purchase there driver (kinda makes sense). But if you have a hangup on buying the CMS software then this cheep solution is not for you... All flames to /dev/null! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet : howardl@wb3ffv.ampr.org | Howard D. Leadmon UUCP : wb3ffv!howardl | Advanced Business Solutions TELEX : 152252474 | 210 E. Lombard St - Suite 410 FAX : (301)-244-8790 | Baltimore, MD 21202 PACKET : WB3FFV @ WB3FFV.MD.USA.NA | Phone: (301)-576-8635