SUMMARY: Exabytes/SunOS4.0.3

From: dj@astro.lsa.umich.edu
Date: Mon Jul 15 1991 - 14:53:52 CDT


This is a rather late summary. My apologies, but life's been quite
busy.

Exabyte/SunOS4.0.3 summary:
---------------------------

Original question: does SunOS4.0.3 support Exabyte drives?

Unfortunately, I didn't define what I meant by "support". I need to be
able to use the full mtio support (backwards and forwards file
skipping, checking for eof's, eot's, error reports, etc).

Perhaps because of my vagueness, most negative responses didn't indicate
_what_ didn't work, only that it didn't.

Most positive responses indicated that the 4.0.3 provided enough
functionality to perform dump/backup stuff, but not much else.
Some seemed to indicate that they could do more than that, although
how much more was rather vague.

To confuse matters, many responses (maybe 40%) indicated that a new
driver was necessary (perhaps to do fancy stuff?). Again, what was
considered to be the minimum level of functionality by the respondant
was somewhat hard to quantify.

On a few points all were unaninimous: 4.0.3c on SparcStations didn't
support the Exabytes. 4.0.3 on both sun3's and sun4's seemed to work.

Most people indicated that third party drivers had much more functionality
than the standard distributed drivers.

Miscellaneous notes:

4.0.3 doesn't do 8500's, just 8200's.
Some have noticed scsi bus lockups using the Sun driver.

In conclusion, if you want to do more than just backups, you'll probably need
a driver other than the distributed one. Also, those with the third-party
drivers preferred them even if all they did were backups.

thanks to (in alphabetical order):

"alex" <alexl%daemon.cna.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET>
Al Lichty <lichty@anthro.utah.edu>
Alastair Young <alastair@eucad.co.uk>
Dan Butzer <butzer@cis.ohio-state.edu>
David Wiseman <magi@csd.uwo.ca>
Harvey Richardson <harvey@physics.heriot-watt.ac.uk>
Jeff Nieusma <nieusma@cs.Colorado.EDU>
John Valdes <valdes@geosun.uchicago.edu>
Jon Fiscus <jon@jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov>
Mike Raffety <miker%oconnor.uucp@oddjob.uchicago.edu>
Rick Dipper <rick@computer-science.manchester.ac.uk>
Robert E. Toense <toense@cplxsys.ncsl.nist.gov>
Roger Burroughes <roger@cogsci.edinburgh.ac.uk>
Simon Bob Halsall <sh@dsbc.icl.co.uk>
Steve Hanson <hanson@calvin.fnal.gov>
T.D.Lee@durham.ac.uk
Tim Beyea <beyea@ERC.MsState.Edu>
aldrich@sunrise.stanford.edu (Jeff Aldrich)
asc!jerry (Jerry Stachowski)
baumann%proton.uucp@ucrmath.ucr.edu (Michael Baumann)
bchivers@smiley.mitre.org (Brent Chivers)
bernards%ecn.nl@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
brent@curie.ssctr.bcm.tmc.edu (Brent Alan Wiese)
doug@perry.berkeley.edu (Doug Neuhauser)
esanborn%cadence.uucp@uunet.UU.NET (Ed Sanborn)
fabrice@sj.ATE.SLB.COM (Fabrice Le Metayer)
fred@spindletop.tamu.edu (Fred Seals 5-2298)
geertj%ica.philips.nl%philica.uucp@phigate.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)
jim_mckenna@ub.cc.umich.edu
jmcrowell@ucdavis.edu (John M. Crowell)
kjv@tampella.fi (V{{r{nen Kari)
lentz@ody1.uchicago.edu (Gordon Lentz)
lloyd@ironduke.utah.edu (Lloyd R Staley)
mark%flyer%deltam.uucp@uunet.UU.NET (mark galbraith)
patp@juliet.ll.mit.edu
phil@pex.eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre)
rackow@antares.mcs.anl.gov
tom@yac.llnl.gov
tony@Canada.Sun.COM (Tony Santos - Sys/Net Administrator Sun Toronto)
tonytran@leland.stanford.edu
trinkle@cs.purdue.edu
zeke@mpl.UCSD.EDU (Rob Scott)



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