I have an Exabyte Eagle TR-3 drive, and I had a look at the floppy tape situation a while back. The driver is.. well.. inadequate. It makes a lot of assumptions that are quite a few years incorrect. But they're probably still needed if someone has those old drives. New drives come in all sorts of configurations and can be queried for the correct parameters, among other differences. Also, it's weirdly split into kernel and user-level parts, and makes no attempt whatsoever to pretend to be a "proper" Unix tape.
I was going to fix all of this a while back, and I still have the pile of documentation on how floppy tape works. I think I planned to write a standard QIC header at the beginning of the tape and fake up SCSI-like behavior (end of file marks, etc.). Hackers have bizzare motivations sometimes, and my motivation for this project was to back up my machine so I could install it anew. Unfortunately, it's now been so long that I really have to reinstall _before_ I'd want to start on such a thing. And I'm not sure I care anymore. I certainly don't have the free time for some time to come. -- Christopher Masto Director of Operations NetMonger Communications ch...@netmonger.net i...@netmonger.net http://www.netmonger.net "Good tools allow users to do stupid things." -- Clay Shirky To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
