Exabyte Hangs !!!

[Alan J. Broder]

We have an Exabyte tape drive attached to a Sun-3/180 running 4.0.1 using
the scsi-3 interface. We are having big problems. We backed up a whole
disk two separate ways. First using tar, we did:

	tar cvbf 126 /dev/rst9 .

then we did a dump of the same disk to ensure that we could recover our
files. 

If you do a  
	tar tvbf 126 /dev/rst9
tar proceeds to list all the files on the tape correctly. However,
if you do a
	tar xvbf 126 /dev/rst9
to restore all the files, tar makes it part of the way through and then
just stops. At this point, tar can't be killed, even by root doing a "kill
-9". The only way to ever use the tape drive again is to reboot the
system. We discovered the exact same thing ocurring with the "dump" tape.

Why is it that tar can traverse and list out the contents of the entire
tape using "tar tv" but it hangs when doing a "tar xv" ?  Has anyone seen
a similar problem ? There is clearly a big bug somewhere, perhaps the SCSI
driver (we use the scsi driver that comes with the system).

Can anyone help ?

Alan Broder 
ajb at cornea.mitre.org <----- use this address
The MITRE Corporation