Very Computer

Hello,

please help me to know how to mount a tape device on a Sun Solaris 1.1
system.

This is a very serious problem for me, thank you very much from now.

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Saludos, regards

Jose Angel Navaln Martnez
Universitat de Valncia (spain).

You can't "mount" a tape device (unless you're running Networker, which
you don't mention).

What are you really trying to do?

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Tony

The OP said

        on a Sun Solaris 1.1 system.

aka SunOS 4.1.3

--
Tony

That's easy. Tape devices are not random-access. You can't "mount" them per
se, like you would with a disk partition or NFS directory.

In Solaris 1.1, they expect the tape drive to be SCSI ID 4 or 5. I believe the
device numbers will be /dev/rst8 and /dev/rst9, respectively. Non-rewind
devices are /dev/nrst8 and /dev/nrst9, respectively.

You would use tar, cpio, or dump & restore to access data on the tapes. You
would use the mt command to control the tape drive, make it rewind, go
offline, etc..

Read the manual pages for the respective commands, and please ask more
specific questions. Describe what you want to do, and someone can help you.

Quote:> This is a very serious problem for me, thank you very much from now.

Glad you said this, because at first I really thought you were joking
around...

Not true in general (though it is true in the case of Solaris).

I remember an AT&T machine (3B2/400 running Unix SVR2 and SVR3) a long
time ago which *did* allow you to create filesystems on a tape and to
mount them.  It emulated random access by, IIRC, treating the tape as a
very large, slow, ring buffer. If you were reading block 654321 and you
wanted block 123456 you'd wait for it to read to the end, rewind and
then seek to block 123456.  *Very* slow, and it didn't half wear out
tape drives! The fact that it used a System V filesystem, which has no
cylinder groups, has a single superblock and keeps a single inode list
at the start of the filesystem didn't help either...

It was occasionally handy for archiving small numbers of large files,
though.  

--
Tony

The scsi id's and and names aren't guaranteed to be correct.  For Solaris 1.x,
you had to configure a kernel to enable devices.  Perhaps the information
you gave is for the GENERIC kernel.  If so, if the person requesting info
is also using the GENERIC kernel, everything would work.

The answer is also a bit more complicated.  /dev/nrst0, /dev/nrst8,
/dev/nrst16, and /dev/nrst24 all point to the same drive, but access it
differently.  If the input device is a reel tape drive, then different device
names would get 1600bpi or 6250bpi.  If the input drive is an Exabyte
(non-Mammoth), then depending on the drive name, you would get 8200 mode,
8500 mode, 8200 mode compressed or 8500 mode compressed, if the device
supported these.  Unfortunately, Solaris 1.x doesn't support Exabytes, so
the use needs to modify the kernel source to add support.

Quote:>You would use tar, cpio, or dump & restore to access data on the tapes. You
>would use the mt command to control the tape drive, make it rewind, go
>offline, etc..

>Read the manual pages for the respective commands, and please ask more
>specific questions. Describe what you want to do, and someone can help you.

>> This is a very serious problem for me, thank you very much from now.

>Glad you said this, because at first I really thought you were joking
>around...

        Kevin W. Thomas
        Sun System Administrator & Meteorologist
        Norman, Oklahoma