Re: Backups with ftape

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

>Does anyone in here use an iomega tape drive??
Yo! An IOMEGA 3200, and getting it to work in Linux is a good learning
experience (seriously!). 

>I just purchased one and was wondering why I keep getting I/O Errors.
What distribution are you using?  If you're using Red Hat, I'm not sur-
prised.  Last I looked, RHS was still shipping an old version of ftape,
which was basically broken for most floppy tapes. This can bw fixed
by upgrading to a newer version of ftape (see below), and recompiling
your kernel so it does NOT have ftpae support (the new ftape works as
a module OR as part of the kernel).

>The site in the HOWTO for ftape does not appear to exist anymore. 
Try...
             ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/tapes

ftape-3.04d.tar.gz is about 663 KB and is pretty much as complete as it comes,
source, makefiles, HTML installation directions, and so on.

>I am curious if this is the tape or the actual device. 
One never knows until one tries, does one? I have a couple of commercial 
OS'es around (company name somewhere in this message), and sometimes hard-
ware comes with software drivers that claim to provide support under one or
more of said OS'es. Another viarant is that the OS makes some claim to sup-
porting said devices. I like trying to check out hardware with one of these
configurations before trying a [new] Linux driver (at least the first time,
if possible), so I don't waste lots of time chasing software problems based
on a defective piece of hardware.

>It is an Iomega 800 MB Internal ftape drive.
ftape will support this drive, but go forth, ftp, unpack, and read. Then
recompile and configure. If you have more questions, let me know...

>         Microsoft...How many times do you want to reboot today?
          Linux ... what do you want to [re]compile today?... but...
                    where do you want to go TOMORROW?
                     Whatever the answer, fear not, the SOURCE is with you!