so try to copy stuff to tape, again ... find /home/ralph | buffer | tar zcvf /dev/st0 -T - should sound nice and smooth .. no stopping and starting - it should be a constant and steady whineI think I've exhausted my resources attacking this from the software side.Will do a little mobo swap and see what happens.yeah.. but first get the tar command and buffer right... than spend some dough on a better mb, but no guarantee to fix the original problem - get a new tape cleaner and new tape - try a different tape drive - make sure you have enough cpu hp - make sure yu have enough memory - ( top -i ) should be almost no load while writing to tapes c ya alvin
Ok, but only cause you asked all nice like :) I tried it one more time... Cleaned the drive with a new cleaning cart and used a new tape. I was the only user logged on the box and top -i showed CPU 99.7% idle Running a Celeron 2.4GHz w/ 512MB RAM Ran the tar through buffer: shinzon:~# find /usr/kbmosas/std | buffer | tar zcvf /dev/st0 -T - tar: Removing leading `/' from member names /usr/kbmosas/std/ /usr/kbmosas/std/_amort /usr/kbmosas/std/_ascii /usr/kbmosas/std/_browse ... /usr/kbmosas/std/_label /usr/kbmosas/std/_qres /usr/kbmosas/std/_xkey.utl Backed up 110 files, 1.2MB without any errors from tar ok, now read the tape back: shinzon:~# tar tzvf /dev/st0 drwxrws--- root/users 0 2005-08-25 10:10:35 usr/kbmosas/std/ -rw-rw---- root/users 7516 2005-08-25 10:31:52 usr/kbmosas/std/_amort tar: Skipping to next header tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated tar: Child died with signal 13 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors = barfdI have already tried two different tape drives (seagate/sony), different tapes, cleaned the drive repeatedly, flashed bios on scsi with latest ver, updated tar to 1.15.1-2, and now tried buffer(ing). Tested writing/reading tar ball to hd with no problem. And there is the fact that if I put this scsi card and either tape drive in another box (tried two other 1- SCO Unix on a 486DX266 and 2- Debian Linux on a PII in testing), they work fine.
This all leads me to think that the problem is the environment (mobo). Maybe this particular combination of mobo/scsi?
I'll let you know what happens. Ralph Eagle Kubinski Business Systems