Exabyte and file positioning

[lbd at alux4.att.com]

Last November, we upgraded from 3.5 directly to 4.0.3. We have used
Exabyte tape drives for backups on both OS's with no problems, using the
exact same dump script. The dump command we use is:

/usr/etc/dump 1ubdfs 126 54000 /dev/nrst1 6000 /

(our exabyte drive is rst1). This is on a 3/280 server, but we run the
exact same command on 15 other servers running 4.0.1 or 4.0.3 and have
never had a problem. We use the standard Sun SCSI driver, too.

The only problem I've ever run into is trying to read 3.5 tapes into
4.0.3. Using a blocking factor of 2 with restore works around it.

In short, we installed no patch and have had no trouble.

Leslie Dreyer, Bell Labs
att!alux4!lbd