SUMMARY: DLT8000 compatibility

From: Andrew Raine <Andrew.Raine_at_mrc-dunn.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 13:05:58 +0000

Dear Tru64-managers,

As always the response from this list is wonderful!

Many thanks to:

Anthony Talltree, Cathy Chandra, Michael Crowley, Robert Lang and Peter
Stern

who all pointed out the different endian-ness of MIPS SGIs relative to
Conmpaq Alphas, and gave variations on using the non-swapping tape
device, using "dd -conv=swab" and making sure that I was specifying the
right block-size on the tar command.

As it happens, I'd already tried all these (I should have said so in
the original post, but I was stressed!). I found a correct solution by
reading the man page for tps (the SCSI tape interface on IRIX) in
combination with the google archive of the comp.sys.sgi.* newsgroups

My /var/sysgen/master.d/scsi didn't have a definition for the DLT8000
drive, so my system thought it was a DLT7000, and was trying to read
the tape accordingly. Adding a new stanza to /var/sysgen/master.d/scsi
and rebooting twice (once to force a rebuild of the kernel, and once to
boot that new kernel) fixed things - I can now read the tape with the
non-swapping devices (/dev/rmt/tps?d?ns*).

I will take Peter Stern's advice and make sure that any tapes *written*
from the SGI have an appropriate block-size to be read by Tru64.

Regards,

Andrew

--
Dr. Andrew Raine, Head of IT, MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, 
Wellcome Trust/MRC Building, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2XY, UK
phone: +44 (0)1223 252830   fax: +44 (0)1223 252835
web: www.mrc-dunn.cam.ac.uk email: Andrew.Raine_at_mrc-dunn.cam.ac.uk
Received on Tue Feb 26 2002 - 13:01:43 NZDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed Nov 08 2023 - 11:53:43 NZDT