Tape drive out to lunch

[Mikel Manitius]

> 	/dev/rmt12: No such device or address

I have had the same identical problem happen a couple of years ago on
a Vax 11/780 with 4.1bsd, the problem is not in permissions anywhere,
you will notice that if you are using the tapedrive and try to access
it from another terminal you will get the same message. When the tape
drive gets an i/o error for some reason, it will backup and try to read
the same data again, it will repeat this several times if needed. For
some obscure reasons, the driver may "hang" on this, and you cannot
kill the process, it just sits there (even if you try bringing the system
down, you will get a message "warning, some processes wouldn't die...").
Since the process still has the device open, no other process can access it.
And the kernel just sais that the device does not exist. I'm not sure
if there is a fix for it, but rebooting the Vax will free up the device
again.
-- 
	Mikel Manitius  - ...{ihnp4|akguc|attmail|indra!koura}!codas!mikel