Tape cartridge hung

[Chris Lewis]

In article <8 at utekza.UUCP> kevin at utekza.UUCP (Kevin Gribble) writes:
> In article <1990Aug2.074751.4386 at oct1.UUCP> mason at oct1.UUCP (David Mason) writes:
> >In article <1990Jul30.210437.17290 at eci386.uucp> clewis at eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
> >writes:
> %>Is that a tape drive?  Early Wangtek 60Mb streamers had some sort of
> %>bug in the controller that caused them to hang when used with UNIX
> %>or Xenix.  Wangtek was shipping 150's for a while for no extra charge.

> %Please, tell me more.  We have installed a large number of the Wangtek
> %60 Mb tape drives over the last few years, and every now and then one
> %hangs.  The tape stops, the light on the cartridge drive stays on and
> %the associated cpio process hangs.  Only a reboot clears it.

I heard this verbally from the support people for our 386 motherboard
(SCI), and since they were quite reliable on other things, I can only
assume that this was true.  Unfortunately, they didn't isssue a Engineering
note on the subject, so I can't give you any other details than that.
This was about 1 1/2 years ago, so one would assume that if Wangtek was
going to do anything about it, it would have been done by now.  Which
would explain why replacing your controller with a new one usually fixes
the problem.

In our case, the whole system locks up.  But we waited too long to persue
it with our tape vendor, and we still have the one that hangs.  Scenario:
we do automated nightly backups, designed to write as close to 60Mb as
possible.  The chance of system lockup appears to be approximately
1 night in 5.  If we try doing any substantial tape activity during normal
daily loading, the chances of lockup are considerably higher.  Since the
whole system locks up, there's no way of killing it, so it ain't a defunct
process per-se.  Further, the exact symptoms of the problem would differ
depending on your tape device driver, so I'd imagine our 'ix (1.0.6) would
differ from ix 2+ or SCO Xenix/UNIX.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
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