Exabyte on Personal Iris

[Dave Olson]

sharp at usceast.UUCP (Harry Sharp) writes:
| We here at University of South Carolina have purchased an Exabyte
| tape drive for doing network backups.  Unfortunately, we purchased
| it for a workstation that we were *supposed* to get, but the Dean
| has seen things differently.  We need desparately to verify the machine
| works, but our only SCSI box with the correct type of port is one
| of our Personal Irises.  We have the cable and the little darling
| powers up correctly, but it doesn't seem to want to play with the
| SGI.  We have been told that SGI has not "qualified" the Exabyte for the
| Personal Iris.  Anybody know why?? Anybody from SGI wish to defend this
| position??

We haven't qualified it due to the tradeoff between resources and
perceived demand.  The PI has somewhat more extensive SCSI diagnostics
at powerup than the other 4D machines, and the Exabyte consistently
fails them.  The failure is caused by Exabyte not supporting some of
the commands used; in itself this is OK, but the way they reject them
is non-standard.  In any case, this is non-fatal.  Simply continue
after the failed diagnostics message.

Also be sure that all the terminator resistors are removed if you
are using it internally, and are installed if using it externally.

Once the system is up, you will need to run 'cd /dev; ./MAKEDEV tape'
After that, your /dev/*tape* entries will have links appropriate for
the Exabyte.  You need IRIX 3.1G or later.

If you have 3.2, there may be problems putting multiple archives on the
same tape if you use bru or tar (it will sometimes rewind when it
shouldn't, overwriting your earlier archives).  This problem is fixed
in 3.3
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.