> Forget it.  I can't get a tape drive to work reliably on the sparc port.
> DAT dies miserably, an old Sun Viper dies, an Exabyte dies too.

This is rather distressing.

I've been thinking about the reasons why I haven't been able to contribute
anything significant to the effort, and besides the obvious reasons (i.e.
my general stupidity (-: ) I think that a main one is simply the fact that
I don't run NetBSD/SPARC here at home.  Although I run it at work, I simply
don't have the time at work to do anything approaching "development"; my
SS2 there is mainly used as a glorified X terminal to get at other machines.
(Yes, I find that depressing and distressing as well, but that's what they
 pay me to do, not twiddle bits of an OS that is only run by one other person
 at a 5,000+ person US Gov't laboratory.  Sigh.)

Anyway, in looking at this situation, I asked myself what it is that I depend
on most in my at-home environment.  Basically it's

	(1) my Exabyte 8500, since at-home backups are an absolute *necessity*
	(2) solid support for my 2 internal 1.225 Gb Quantums
	(3) my CD-ROM drive to boot from in an emergency
	(4) DP on-demand dialup PPP software
	(5) INN software (I get a partial newsfeed sent from work to home)
	(6) netatalk 1.3.1, which provides AppleShare capability to our Mac
	(7) I'm also running FlexFAX (now HylaFAX), but that's become more
	    irrelevant since the Mac has a FAX modem and I switched the PPP
	    link to be more-or-less 24x7

All of the above are solidly supported by SunOS 4.1.4.  I don't know how many
of you folks are running with a SPARC box at home, but I absolutely,
positively can't run an OS at home that I can't do reliable backups for (and
reliable restores as well).

As far as I know, INN can probably be fairly easily rebuilt on NetBSD.  And
#3 is more or less a wash since we still don't have bootable NetBSD CD-ROMs.
On the software front, there's been recent mumblings about DP, but the
proposed solution (i.e., put STREAMS into NetBSD so porting DP becomes more
or less a trivial thing) is probably some way off (I'd rather see a port of
DP to the existing software architecture, at least for now, if possible).
Last summer there were a few mumblings about netatalk, but I never heard
anything more about that (netatalk builds very easily on SunOS, and I have
no desire to deal with the 190-patches-and-climbing CAP).

But I'm most concerned about #1 and #2; I've got 4 disks on the SS2 at work
and 2 here at home, and at work at least the disks are rock solid (modulo
the occasional total disk wedge that others have also mentioned).  Greywolf's
recent experiences make me nervous.  But no solid tape drive support REALLY
makes me VERY nervous.  I just can't risk going to an OS I can't back up and
recover.  What is everyone else doing?  Is everybody else running it at work
and doing backups over the net?  What good does that do if you're crashed?

If anyone has any comments on the state of the Universe with respect to these
issues, I'd appreciate it.

(Wishing SCSI expert Matt Jacob hadn't been driven away from the project ... )

	- Greg