6 Mar
2013
6 Mar
'13
7:13 p.m.
On 03/06/2013 06:25 PM, Dennis Boone wrote:
That said, nothing listed so far will deal with some
of the variables
mentioned by Chuck -- parity etc. Best I can tell, on Linux it's not
possible to determine (or set) that sort of thing without resorting to
scsi generic access and maybe knowledge of a specific drive, or to
device-specific drivers. I can't speak to the FreeBSD, Solaris
etc. tape ioctls, windoze, etc.
In the old days, a lot of very strange stuff was written using tape.
Nowadays with tape drives made in the 80s, I'm not sure that you can get
away with a lot of stuff. Will an auto-load drive, for example, handle
a tape with multiple BOT markers on it? In the old days, if you wanted
to build a tape containing important files and utilities that you could
just take along with you to a customer's site, you could write a file or
two, move the tape manually down a bit, stick on a BOT, write some more,
and so on.
What's the maximum block length that drives and OSes can handle? Just
kilobytes or megabytes?
I can't really comment just from a man page.
--Chuck