Re: Problems with DAT tape....

["Steve Wolfe" <nw@codon.com>]

>   A while ago, I took one of the machines here and started using XFS on
> it.  The kernel is 2.4.6, with the appropriate xfs patches.  All of the
> XFS stuff works marvelously, but now I'm having quite a bit of trouble
> trying to make backups to the DAT drive in it.
>
>   After I upgraded the machine, whenever I try and send a tar to the
tape
> (i.e., "trying tar cf /dev/nst0 BACKUP.LABEL"), I get:
>
> ST0:  Write not multiple of tape block size

  Well, I think that I found the problem.  It looks like it just managed
to happen during the transition to XFS, but is not XFS-related.  The
ultimate problem, upon investigation, was that the tape's block size was
set to 1 megabyte.  I got poking around, and it looks like the result of a
poorly-written script.

  A previous admin had installed a backup script from O'Reilly's "Unix
Backup and Recovery".  One of the kludgy things that it does is
temporarily set the block size on the tape to a megabyte, to fool
something into thinking that the tape is huge.  Apparently, someone must
have started the script, then stopped it before it could reset the block
size of the tape.

  The 1500+ line script was quickly replaced by a very short one. ; )

steve