mcitron@phad.hsc.usc.edu (Mark Citron) (12/06/90)
We have been having intermitent problems with our nightly, unattended tar backups. We are using an AST 386/33 machine with 12Mb of memory and are running SCO 3.2.0 with tcp/ip. We backup onto a Mountain Filesafe 7150 which is a 150 Mb drive. Usually after a reboot tar will work fine. After one to four successful backups tar will fail and continue to hang (with cannot open /dev/rct0) as an unkillable process. The only way out is to reboot. On some occasions tar will return "cannot open /dev/rct0" but if left running will start the tar somewhere in the middle of the filesystem and will finish successfully (with only some files backed up). I redirect tar output to a file so I can monitor what it did the previous night. I have heard some similar comments about Archive drives. Does anyone else have similar problems with Mountain? Can anyone suggest a solution? SCO thinks we have a DMA conflict but I cannot find anything wrong. We are using DMA 1 for the tape with all the standard default addesses. SCO's next suggestion is to remove ALL my drivers (ethernet, equinox-serial ports, etc) which is too painful to think about. Thanks for any suggestions, -- Mark Citron mark@neurosci.usc.edu