On 2003.01.25 01:07 Michael Sokolov wrote: Well, I had to use some programm to write the tapes, dd(1), maketape, or somthing else. I made good experiences with maketape to write 2.11BSD tapes, so I stayed with it and it worked very well. The same for dd(1). There may some implementation differences in dd(1), say on SunOS or AIX, that may produce unusable tapes. Therefore I used maketape. I had a glance at the code and it seams that it does everything proper on every UNIX and Unix-like OS. Don't forget the chicken-egg problem. If I have no 4.3BSD-Quasijarus running, I have to use some random foreign OS to produce distribution tapes. (Or I have to bother somone else to do it for me.) I learnd that the bs= parameter of dd doesn't set the block size of the tape with an ioctl, it is only the buffersize parameter that is used in the write(2) syscall. But as already said, maybe some other implementations of dd and tape drivers may do somthing else. -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/