Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!NUSVM.BITNET!GBOPOLY1 From: GBOPOLY1@NUSVM.BITNET (fclim) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: problem with domain/ix tar Message-ID: <8806061205.AA21669@umix.cc.umich.edu> Date: 6 Jun 88 11:56:20 GMT Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 28 X-Unparsable-Date: Mon, 06 Jun 88 19:35:23 SST hi, thanks to everyone who replied to my question about tar. does the blocking factor == 1 inherent in apollo cartridge drive? or will it increase with sr10? i am not too sure about the blocking factor when the tape was made. i just think that it's a drag to restrict all tapes to bf to 1. people who are willing to make tapes for me do not wish to do at such low bf. another thing: those who had replied did not consider my concern about mag-tapes. long ago, i managed to tar 3 mag-tapes successfully. several months after this, i couldn't tar, even with the original 3 mag-tapes. i keep getting "can't open /dev/rmt8" messages. this was on dn300 with sr9.2; i have not tried out dn3000 with sr9.7. the mag-tape drive couldn't have conk out in the meantime as we can still use /com/[rw]bak. i think /[sys5 | bsd4.2]/bin/tar was the one that got conked. the 3 "good" mag-tapes are one that was made at waterloo, canada; one from rms (fsf/gnu-emacs) and one from unix-tex (mackay@uwash). these 3, i've managed to tar the first time round. later, i received one (mag-tape) from nelson beebe (his utah's tex-dvi drivers family) which couldn't be read with tar. this was the beginning of the end of the tar on my apollo system; everytime i used tar after this, i got the above- mentioned message. (note that utah-science.arpa is a top-20 machine; although i believe tar is tar whether it's on top-20, sun or apollo). i passed this utah tape over to a friend who had no problem on a sun 3/60. what's going on here? i hope that the problem will get fixed at sr10. --fclim.