"bug" in st tape driver

Tony Cooper tony at tui.marcam.dsir.govt.nz
Tue May 21 11:17:18 AEST 1991


When I created the st tape driver that has been posted to jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov
I forgot to turn off the "generic" flag. This means that the driver checks to
see what device it is addressing and if it identifies the device it proceeds
as it should. But if it cannot identify the device it traets it as a generic
tape drive. This means that the driver will attempt to use anything you tell
it to use.

On the plus side this means that it will probably work with more tape drives
than advertised. Make sure you use the testdrive script first to see if there
may be problems. On the minus side it treats anything on the SCSI bus as a
tape drive. So you can really foul up your hard drive if you make a typing
mistake. This "feature" will be turned off in future releases.

Tony Cooper
sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz



More information about the Comp.unix.aux mailing list