More than one tar file on streamer

[Ralph P. Sobek]

mcvax!aivru.sheffield.ac.uk!chris at uunet.uu.net (Chris Brown) writes:
> 
> One would imagine that a series of "tar cf /dev/nrst8 ..." commands would
> work but I have not reliably been able to space forward to later files on
> tapes written this way.

But they do work, for me!  I have a script which builds me a tar cassette
with only "tar cf /dev/nrst8 ..." and "cd" commands.  I have since been
able to extract from various positions on the tape.  This is under SunOS
3.5.  While getting this going, I did find out something, though.  If one
of the tar jobs aborted, there was a non negligible probability that the
next image would either be corrupted, or rst0 would complain with a
message that we never found in the documentation.  It seemed to create a
bad spot, and the only solution, that I found, was "mt -f /dev/rst8
erase"!!  REALLY!

-- 
Ralph P. Sobek			  Disclaimer: The above ruminations are my own.
ralph at laas.laas.fr			   Addresses are ordered by importance.
ralph at laas.uucp, or ...!uunet!mcvax!laas!ralph		If all else fails, try:
SOBEK at FRMOP11.BITNET				      sobek at eclair.Berkeley.EDU