Wolfgang Weisselberg wrote: > Hi! > > Trying to kill the keyboard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] produced: > > The tape is currently not being removed from the drive, so it is given > > all the time it needs, and we are letting cron handle it. when i arrive > > in the morning it has given this error, but ps lists tar, backup and > > ftmt as still running. the tape is just sitting there whirring, forward, > > back a bit, forward. like its busy but i can't imagine what its really > > doing. > > That phenomenon is called shoeshining. I am not sure that > it is known what really happens in all details and the cause. > The tape is probably not getting data fast enough, so it has > to stop streaming and rewind a bit and try again ... and so on. > > Or it is trying to play random access device :-) > > > i kill -9 the processes to stop the drive, then i rewind it. next time > > cron runs the script, the same thing happens. > > Seems it's not streaming then as the data is coming in to > slowly. Try some sort of buffering (e.g. using buffer) > and/or increase the DMA areas for the tape. > > -Wolfgang how do i use buffer? how do I increase the dma areas? the drive has currently been fdc limitted to 2000, which i did to try to solve overrun errors. any more help is greatly appreciated. also, what are good directories to ignore with tar, i will add /proc and /dev are there any more that are obvious? nathan
