SUMMARY: Using AIT-2 after booting from CD

From: Marco Greene (Home) <mgreene_at_aci.on.ca>
Date: Fri Sep 10 2004 - 15:04:48 EDT
Sorry for the late posting...but thanks to Darren Dunham once again who
pointed out that it will work without having to edit st.conf.

Here is his reply below.  This is a lot less effort than going through and
making a boot server; which I do not have the hardware for...


>
> Ok that works...so st.conf is really only for getting the most
> performance out of your tape drive?

Sort of.  If you take a look at the st man page, you'll see what it can set.

#1 Options.  That specifies what the drive can support.  In most cases,
   those options do not affect bare reads and writes.

   Does it support backspace over EOF?  What methods are used to select
   the correct density on writes?  How does it react to end of tape?
   How are variable length blocks handled?

   Almost none of which is anything that you'll care about during a
   restore.

#2 Densities.  Almost universally, densities are only set when the tape
   is written.  You can tell it any density you want on read, and it'll
   ignore you to read the data.


I remember when the DLT7000s first came out.  If you didn't have the right
st.conf, then they didn't fastforward properly.  You'd end up sort of
"play"ing through the tape to the spot you wanted before it would start
writing.  Annoying (took hours if the tape was full), but functional.

The raw methods of doing advance, rewind, read, write, etc. are pretty
standardized across all tape devices.  Those aren't part of the st.conf
entries.

--
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham@taos.com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
         < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. >
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Received on Fri Sep 10 15:04:39 2004

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