Tape I/O

[John Grover]

Here at the U of Maine, we (the computing center) receive Ultrix
distributions from DEC which we then have to turn around and
supply to others on campus. Since we don't like to let the tapes
out of our grubby mitts, we need to be able to copy from one tape
to another and, of course, have the resulting tape usable by the
recipient. Further, we would like to be able to copy from tapes
of one type to another, and even to disk (so we might FTP to a
non-local site.) I have been trying to do this using dd, but I have
run into several snags, and don't feel comfortable about the
results so far. Are there tape utilities out there that will let
me investigate what format a tape is in (dump? tar?) as well as
block and record sizes. Has anybody done anything like this?

John Grover
Computing Center
University of Maine