On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Scott R. Burns wrote:

>I have a DDS-2 DAT tape created on a Solaris V2.6.x box using a Sun DAT drive using Sun's tar. I am using:
>
>HP 24x6 drive using Tar under V1.3.3/i386
>
>The tape was created using all the Sun defaults I believe but I do not know for sure.
>
>1) I think the blocking factor for Sun/Solaris tar is 20 by default
>2) The normal /dev/rmt/xxxx tape device was probably used (ie. not 
>   the Berkley compatible mode etc.)(Probably 0hn I think ?).

Does the drive on the Solaris system have a higher density mode than the
drive on the NetBSD system?  I'd try using the 0ln device to write the
tape.  Also, can you read on the Solaris system tapes written on the NetBSD
system?

>3) Do I have to do anything special on a tar archive coming from Solaris,
>   SPARC platform (byte order) etc. to read this tape on my machine ?

No.  I can transfer files in the same way (but using an Exabyte).

>4) I have tried a cleaning tape on the drive
>5) The drive is used for our backups every night without issue, those tapes are readable.
>5) Here are the messages generates by the HP drive when I read the tape with:
>
>chio move slot 5 drive 0
>mt rewind

Are you waiting for the drive to come ready at this point?  I'm not too sure
about DAT, but with an Exabyte you have to wait until the tape has loaded.
If you are doing this in a script, you can either (a) sleep 60 (and hope for
the best!) or (b) use "mt status", and spin on non-zero exit status (with
perhaps a 10 sec sleep in the loop).

>tar -xvf /dev/nrst0

Roger

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