wangtek retensioning problems

Uwe Doering gemini at geminix.UUCP
Sun Feb 11 00:37:26 AEST 1990


wsinpdb at eutws1.win.tue.nl (Paul de Bra) writes:

>In article <OMLCD2 at geminix.UUCP> gemini at netmbx.UUCP writes:
>>tim at comcon.UUCP (Tim Brown) writes:
>>
>>>Ok, I give up!  Does anyone know how to write a tape command to retension
>>>, rewind and erase etc for a wangtek tape drive running under ISC2.0.2?
>>...
>>For erasing and retensioning tapes I wrote two simple programs that should
>>do the trick. I've tested them with the Wangtek 150 MB streamer model.
>>I've named them `wterase' and `wtretens'. Here they are:
>>...

>Amazing how much duplication of effort we see for such a simple problem.

>The real and simple solution is to use the tapecntl(1) command:
> ...
>This command is in AT&T sVr3.2 on which all others are based.

I couldn't find it in ISC 386/ix 2.0.2. I searched the whole directory
tree with find(1). Nothing.

>If your vendor did not supply this program you should complain.

OK, but this doesn't help me right now. And you should know that it
doesn't matter so much what brand the streamer itself is, but what
device driver you have in your UNIX. This is the one the tapecntl(1)
command has to cope with. And I'm quite sure that the ISC wt driver
won't understand the tapecntl(1) ioctl-calls. This should be the
reason why this utility isn't shipped with 386/ix.

After all, writing device drivers is the main task the UNIX vendors
do, and as long as there is no standard how things should be done
every vendor will invent its own driver interface to the application
programs.

But of course this doesn't explain why ISC doesn't ship its own utility
for the wt streamer. Maybe I've looked at the wrong places. If someone
(hello ISC) knows better please tell us.

     Uwe
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