Ultrix 4.1 and Exabyte problem

[Daniel OConnell]

>Is anyone successfully using an Exabyte 8mm tape drive on a
>Ultrix 4.1 system ? Our MicroVax II crashes when we try to write
>to the tape. Sometimes the crash occurs immediately but on other
>occasions the "tar" command runs for one hour before crashing the
>system. The same Exabyte controller and tape drive functioned
>properly using Ultrix 3.0. Any infromation would be appreciated.

>Thanks;

>Joe Spagnolo
>spagnolo at crc.sofkin.ca

Sort of... We have an Exabyte 8200 8mm attached to a CMD 220 controller
on a DECsystem 5400 under Ultrix 4.1. Tar works (well, we have had
one read error failure), but attempts to read variable record size
tapes using dd or a software package all fail. Of course all our
attempts to read variable length records on our TK70, Cipher 990,
and Exebyte now fail under Ultrix 4.1. The TK70 and Cipher 990 could
read variable record size tapes under Ultrix 3.1C (we installed the
Exebyte under Ultrix 4.1).

The same variable record size tapes can be read from SCSI tapes drives
under Ultrix 4.1, but all fail when using our Q-bus controller based
tape drives.

Have some bugs been introduced in the Ultrix 4.1 tms drivers? The tz
drivers appear to work fine.

My dream (fantasy) is that someone at DEC would respond to the above
question.

Dan O'Connell
geomagic at geo1s.mps.ohio-state.edu
geomagic at kcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu