[PARPORT] Tape IOCTL (fsf) questions and HP 7/14 GB Report


Cary O'Brien (cobrien@Radix.Net)
Thu, 22 Jul 1999 17:24:52 -0400 (EDT)


1) Hi all.

2) We got sick of backing up to zip drives and ordered a HP Colorado 7/14GB
   external drive. I picked the external one, hoping that I could use to
   make images of the WIN95 pcs once, then connect it to one of the Linux
   boxes and use samba/smbtar to back up all the volatile data nightly.

   Got the drive (gotta love overnight shipping), upgraded a 333Mhhz celeron
   box to 2.0.36, plugged in the drive, and Viola! dmesg says the drive is
   there. After decidign to *really* shove the tape in hard, everything
   seems to work. Regular and no-rewind devices work as advertized. Speed
   seems slower that when backing up the pcs, but I haven't tried changing
   delay to 0 in the boot parameters yet.

   I was able to back up our development machine, but it took several
   hours. Does the parallel port mode have anything to do with this?

3) The questions.

   14 GB is a lot of space, so I wanted to put several archives on one tape.
   I was able to do this, but when I went to try "mt fsf" to skip past records,
   I found it wasn't supported. The only IOCTL in pt.c seems to be rewind.

   So, does anyone know what is necessary to add the IOCTLs to skip 'files'
   forward and backward on the tape? If someone even knew where I could find
   the protocols I'd be game to try and add them to the current
   code.

THanks in Advance

Cary O'Brien
cobrien@radix.net

-- To unsubscribe, send mail to: linux-parport-request@torque.net --
-- with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. --



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu 22 Jul 1999 - 17:31:01 EDT