Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!sahayman
From: sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Apollo won't release rbak/wbak format.  grrr.
Message-ID: <26979@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 2 Oct 89 15:35:09 GMT
Reply-To: sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman)
Organization: Computer Science Department, Indiana University
Lines: 26


We do all of our nightly dumps to an Exabyte tape drive on a Sun and
use a variety of formats in the process - dump, tar, cpio and wbak.
I wanted to find out some details of the wbak format so that I could
run some simple tools on the Sun to give me a table of contents
of the tape.  So I called Apollo, and their response is that
"the rbak/wbak format is unpublished and we don't want to give it out."

Thanks a lot.

If anyone important at Apollo happens to read this, I hope this policy
can be changed.  I hate doing something as important as backups
without being sure of what I'm writing to the tape.  I don't want all
the source to wbak, I just want something like "man 5 tar" to tell
me about the wbak format.  Mind you I suspect that "man 5 tar" doesn't
tell you the true story of Apollo's tar format, since it doesn't
mention anything about whatever extensions they've added to support
Apollo specific information. (see "man 1 tar", description of the "A" option)

When can we get HP-UX for these things ? :-)

Steve

-- 
Steve Hayman    Workstation Manager    Computer Science Department   Indiana U.
sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu                                    (812) 855-6984