Hi!
Trying to kill the keyboard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] produced:
> Ive dl ftape 4 something and compiled and installed it (make, make install).
You comiled it, so it's the 4.x unstable (which is stable).
4.02 (the last "stable", IIRC) won't even compile since there
were kernel API changes (leading to '"timeout" structure'
errors).
So far, very good.
> And now I want to use it with my Ditto Easy 3200 parallel tape driver.
Yep, that's the right way.
> Ive scanned through all 200 html files (that are not in html form) without
> learning anything.
> All I want to do is to tar my "/home" to a tape (and if somthing goes wrong
> "untar" it from the tape).
ftape is sort of a driver for floppy tapes. So you must load
(using insmod or modprobe) them first[1]. Since you use a
parallel port tape drive, you'll need to load the parport
module as well.
Once that has happened, you can access the tape via the
/dev/(n)qft devices (almost) as usual.
(e.g. tar -... -f /dev/TAPE)
That should give you a handle to understand the docu better.
> Im not even sure that I need ftape to do this, isnt there are rude support
> for parallel tapes built into the RedHat 6.0 kernel (2 something).
There is ftape 3.04d(?) in the kernel sources. Since I use a
different distribution and do my own kernels anyway I cannot
tell you whether ftape 3.04 even compiles on 2.2.x kernels.
Anyway, ftape 4.x unstable is your choice unless you absolutely,
positively need the block-compressing feature of 3.04d.
(And no, tar -z is a bad idea! A rotten bit will kill your
complete archive.) Else use the 4.x version with it's improved
hard write error handling (3.x would just die at such an error,
requiring a reformat on the tape ... to mark that bad spot.)
-Wolfgang
[1] that can be automated in /etc/conf.modules once you know
all the neccessary parameters.
