Everex Tape Archival

[John Plocher]

In article <436 at brian386.UUCP> news at brian386.UUCP (Wm. Brian McCane) writes:
>tried to archive v17 of comp.sources.unix, using
>	tar cvf /dev/mt/rmt4 unix.src/v17
>When I tried to check the first file, it worked fine with.
>	tar tvf /dev/mt/rmt4
>But when I did this command again, it would not give an index for the
>games sources.  WHY!!!

Try the tar command a THIRD time.

>(John , can you help on this one??)

If you are using the Everex only driver (as opposed to the combined
archive/everex driver) then you may have this problem.  That driver
did strange (reas as "bad" or "wrong") things with the no-rewind devices.

This is what (I think) is hapening:

The tape should look like this (with the "^" being the current read pointer):

     [comp.unix.sources.TAR]<EOF>[comp.sources.games.TAR]<EOF><EOF>
     ^
	tar tvf /dev/mt/rmt4
	"Prints out index of archive"
	
     [comp.unix.sources.TAR]<EOF>[comp.sources.games.TAR]<EOF><EOF>
                           ^
	tar tvf /dev/mt/rmt4
	"Prints nothing because it sees an EOF"

     [comp.unix.sources.TAR]<EOF>[comp.sources.games.TAR]<EOF><EOF>
                                 ^
	tar tvf /dev/mt/rmt4
	"Should print out a TOC of the second archive"

  -John