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From: achille@cernvax.UUCP (achille petrilli)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Apollo - Sun TAR transfers
Message-ID: <1025@cernvax.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jul 89 16:35:02 GMT
References: <1130@servax0.essex.ac.uk>
Reply-To: achille@cernvax.UUCP (achille petrilli)
Organization: CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland
Lines: 36

In article <1130@servax0.essex.ac.uk> martin@essex.ac.uk (Colley M) writes:
>............  They suggested the aegis
>command:
>
>	edmtdesc /dev/rct8 -s reo no
>
>Which changes the attribute "reo" to "no" (dont forget to set it back to
>"yes" as rbak/wbak wont work properly).  Then use tar as normal.  This
>worked for us under aegis (Domain/IX) 9.5/9.7.  I haven't tried it at 10.1
>yet.
>
>Hope this is helpful.
>
>Martin Colley

This story of wbak/rbak not working properly if you change /dev/rct8 is just
plain wrong.
W/Rbak use /lib/tfp to access the tape/cartridge. /dev/rct? is just an additional
layer on top of, I guess, /lib/tfp to make it possible to access the device the
"Unix way", i.e. as a file.
Wbak, rbak, rwmt do not use the /dev files in any way, that is the reason why
they are much faster than any user-written program that accesses the devices
via /dev/rct?.

On a, more or less, related argument, I'd like to know if somebody has tested/used
the new backup facility from Apollo, NBS Omniback. I'm interested in hearing any
quirks/problems you had and about its performance.
Also, we have a few Exabytes from Workstation Solutions and whatever is written
on the Apollo is unreadable both on Sun and VMS (Viking controller, TK50 driver),
but both Sun and VMS written cassettes are readable on Apollo.
The message I get is 'illegal block length' (that's the semantic content of it :-).

Anyone can help ?

Achille Petrilli
Cray & PWS operations