Summary: Tape transfer from PC to Sparc

From: Sun Managers at Telecom (sunman@telecom.telecom.com)
Date: Thu Feb 02 1995 - 10:05:46 CST


Original Question:
  I have a user that works at home on a PC. He has a Viper 2150s SCSI tape
drive attached to this PC at home, and wonders if there is a way to use this
tape drive to bring in files to his IPX on his desk. He runs DOS 5.0 at home
and SunOS 4.1.3 on the IPX. These are large files, otherwise he could just
use a floppy.

  Is there a PD DOS tar or dump utility that will write to the tape in a
SunOS (UNIX) compatible tape format? Is there a commercial backup utility
for DOS that will allow a SunOS (UNIX) tape format? Is there a SunOS (UNIX)
program that will extract a certain DOS compatible tape format? He uses
Sytos as his DOS backup program.

****

  I received answers from 7 people, and requests from 2.
  2 people included files.

   Dave Brillhart sent PCTAR & ASPITAPE. These were the most suggested
ways to handle the problem, but people did not know where to go to get them.
ASPITAPE is shareware and asks from $20. This looks like the definitive
package. It includes PCTAR (tar for DOS) and an MT program for manageing
the tape drive. It does require you to be using Adaptec ASPI managers
and SCSI adapter cards (not a problem here).

  Hoff Miller attached tar.exe (for DOS) and pkzip (for SunOS). Now all
I need is pkunzip for SunOS and I'm ready to go. But this does not
include a MT like tape management program to get the file to the tape.

  Hermann Kuhn made some very interesting recomendations, but did not
include any pointers to where the SW might be.

  One recommendation was to use PC/TCP, as they include a TAR utility
in their package, but that still leaves the problem of how to get the
data onto the tape.

  There were several recommendations as to what SW to use, but the people
responding did not know where to look for it.

Here are some further particulars:

Free software:
        GNU tar with a patch written by chris@alderan.sdata.de to
        use Adaptec's ASPI driver (DOC file attached). *****

Commercial software:
        The tar utility from the MKS toolkit can read and write SCSI
        tapes and tar floppies too. You can also use SCSI devices (and
        diskettes) with the cpio, dd, mt and pax commands from this package.

        From: MKS Mortice Kern Systems Inc.
                35 King Street North Waterloo,
                ONT N2J 2W9
                Phone (519) 884-2251
                Fax (519) 884-8861

ftp Software's PC/TCP package has a fully compatible tar utility.

Lone-Tar from Cactus Software.
cactus international
301-829-1622 voice
301-829-1623 fax

For the Mac, there is a good pd package called suntar available on the net.

tkevans@eplrx7.es.duPont.com (Tim Evans)
Chuck Campbell <campbell@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM>
poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
Mike Blandford <mikey@truman.lanl.gov>
pamela@jupiter.Legato.COM (Pamela Pledger)
"Dave Brillhart" <dbrillha@dave.mis.semi.harris.com>
"Harry H. Sun" <Harry.H.Sun@cc.gettysburg.edu>
kuhn@gkss.de (Hermann Kuhn)
Andy McCammont mccammaa@expt05.stp.xfi.bp.com
hoff@vlsi1.racal.com (Hoff Miller)

Thanks to all.

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