Mystical Parameters for 8mm Drive Sought

[Elizabeth Zwicky]

In article <1333 at brchh104.bnr.ca> ziegast at eng.umd.edu (Eric W. Ziegast) writes:
>The "mt eom" command does not work under SunOS 4.*.*.  The fault is on the
>part of the Sun st device driver.

Either this is false, or I am subject to persistent hallucinations of the
most peculiar sort; I've recently been doing data collection from our dump
tapes with a program that starts by doing an "mt eom", and it's worked on
at least two of our drives, and on over a dozen different tapes. Perhaps
they mean not SunOS 4.*.* but SunOS 4.0.3, since we run 4.1, and we did
have hangs on attempts to fsf past eom previously (using different drivers
on different Suns on a different version of the OS, so I'm not willing to
swear to the identity of the critical factor).

The fault that I do know of in the Sun 4.1 st device driver is an
irrational devotion to the concept of writing an eof mark when a device
that has been opened for write is closed. This makes trying to write table
of contents files at the beginning of a tape tricky at best; the old trick
of moving the tape before the close no longer works, and you get erroneous
eofs and a very unhappy tape.

	Elizabeth Zwicky (zwicky at erg.sri.com)