CMS tape backup and sysv386 (Has ANYONE been successful??)

[David Wojtowicz]

I've seen lots of requests for information about getting a CMS tape backup
to work with ISC or ESIX.  It seems that many are looking for the necessary
drivers.  Of course, as far as I know, the only answer to that is to buy
it from CMS for $$$.

Of those of you who did break down an purchase the driver, has anyone managed 
to get everything to work right and successfully back up their system?

For those who are considering the purchase...here's our story...

Not wanting to see the tape drive we had purchased go to waste we
broke down and ordered the driver to use on our DTK386 running ESIX
5.3.2. (tape drive is the JUMBO type)  Installation proceeded smoothly
with installpkg but what it installed wasn't much good.

We encountered a number of problems:

	The fancy jtape (the backup/restore program) opening screens and
menus turn into garbage on the display if you're not using an 8 bit tty.

	The program uses the function keys for everything which, in my
opinion, is DUMB because the escape codes that the function keys send
varies a great deal from terminal to terminal.  It turns out that it
doesn't recognize the escape codes ESIX assigns to the console F-keys.


(CMS support...after 20min of "operators are busy" recordings...thought
it was the strangest thing they'd ever heard of.  They said I must have
installed the hardware improperly.  And its effecting my F-keys?? Right.)

After some experimentation, I discovered the set of escape codes it was
expecting and managed to navigate through the menus by typing the escape
codes myself...not very convenient.

I did manage to format the tape and make a backup.  Great I thought.  I guess
I can live with the F-key problem.  However...I decided to make sure the
backup could really be used if necessary so I deleted some directories
that weren't too important from my account and tried to restore them
from the tape.   That went fine too until I did a ls -l on them.  The
owner and group for each file were set to random UID's and the file
attributes like read and write were also random.

After triple checking everything and trying again twice I got in line
at CMS support again.   After they suggested that I may have overlooked
something in the setup they finally asked what software version I had.
They said OH! you have version x.y.z.  It had a bug that messed up file
permissions.  I'm sure I mentioned the version the last time I spoke
with them and they hadn't mentioned the bug.  They offered to
Federal Express the latest version which they did.

The next morning I cheerfully installed the new version thinking that
my troubles were over.  This time though, on the test restore it was unable
to read any thing off the tape further than about halfway through the
backup (not halfway though the tape since it makes multiple passes on
different tracks).   It just said read error after the name of every
file after the first 30MB or so had been restored.

 (This story is getting long I know so I'll try and hurry)

CMS support said the head was dirty...The drive was brand new and the
head was shiny clean.  The tape was bad?...same thing on a different
length tape from a different manufacturer.  They offered to exchange the
drive which they did but failed to return a cable or two that I packed
back with the original drive.  Also, the new drive was a different model from
the one I sent back.

After all of that...still have the same problems.  I've also tried
tar and backup (which uses cpio) both of which have to talk to it
trough the CMS driver.  They both have similar read error problems.
The final CMS support conclusion..."Hmmm...Umm...We don't support ESIX."
They hadn't mentioned this before.

I still don't have a backup thats good for anything unless what needs
to be restored is on the first part of the tape. I give up!  Several
hundred dollars of hardware and software and many hours of frustrating
trouble shooting and nothing for it.

OK...maybe I'm being far too negative here. To be fair...
Has anyone gotten a CMS hardware/software setup working to their
satisfaction on sysv386?  I'd love to know about it.

David Wojtowicz           |  wojtowic at cs.unca.edu
Atmospheric Science Dept. |  atmsci at unca.bitnet
UNC-Asheville             |