QIC tape blues
Jeff Carroll
bcsaic!carroll at beaver.cs.washington.edu
Tue Mar 6 05:34:16 AEST 1990
I live in a network backwater where all large-scale data xfers take place
via sneakernet. These days the primary media are DEC TK50 (for VMS stuff)
and QIC tape (for UNIX stuff). I have about 10MB of .tar.Z files which
are taking up space on the machine where my email/ftp/news account is
located.
I have two machines with QIC drives at my site; one is a Tektronix 4337
with whatever drive they use, and the other is an Intel 310 running System
V 3.2, with a Bell Technologies drive package (hardware mfr unknown).
At the network gateway, they have only 9-track on the primary host (an
Ultrix VAX); they have a lot of Suns in the vicinity.
First we tried to write everything with a Sun tape drive. The tape was
completely unreadable on both of my machines.
Next I tried dcp to a VMS host, archive to TK50, load to VAX, binary-mode
Kermit to Unix box. Files were mangled beyond uncompress' ability to cope.
Next I drove down the street to a colleague's Iris, which is
network-connected. This box refused to write anything to my 1/4" tapes.
I'm getting frustrated with this. Can anyone recommend a good reading list
or reference work on the ins and outs of various makes of QIC tape drives?
DETAIL is what I'm after. (I'm an EE, I can handle it.) Why can't I make
these machines speak the same language?
What I'd really like to do is write a driver which could read the
native-mode tape formats of all the machines I deal with.
Thanks for any help.
Jeff Carroll
carroll at atc.boeing.com
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