Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome at real-time.com> wrote: > > tape drives are particularly bad, in my experience; I think it's because I/O > is so slow on them. so *don't* kill a process (tar, dump, etc) that's > acessing a tape device, unless you're willing to deal with it hanging and > forcing a reboot to make it work again. Heh.. Tape drives seem to carry a lineage that makes them some of the most autonomous devices that get connected to computers. I'm pretty sure that when you tell a tape drive to erase a tape, just one (or perhaps a few) SCSI commands get sent to the drive. The drive erases the tape, but doesn't respond to anything until the tape is done erasing (or until it finds a bad segment of tape and spits out an I/O error). It's like the polar opposite of the software modems we see these days.. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ How many of you believe in / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ telekinesis? Raise my hand! \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20011214/66e2565b/attachment.pgp