Hello all, I have been messing around with some tape drives on NetBSD. The one in question now is a bit older (Sun branded HP DDS4) - but it was new old stock right out of the factory box. It’s been cleaned as well.
So under NetBSD - I can write to tape seemingly just fine. Reading back (extracting) however goes south immediately. Using the stock tar I get “damaged archive” and it gives up soon after starting the operation. I saw some old message of someone on FreeBSD having (what I thought was) a similar issue to me - and they used GNU tar to work around this. I built gtar from pkgsrc, but it fails in basically the same way (albeit with a different “skipping to next header” type error). I put this same tape drive on an x86 PC running Debian Linux 12 and I get no errors at all. It behaves exactly as I would expect. Is there something in NetBSD that precludes me from using this hardware properly ? Thanks.
