Re: Bugs in 1.3.8[8,9] and 1.3.90

William M. Perkins (bill@grnwood.grnwood.richmond.us.net)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 21:49:30 -0400 (EDT)

> Hiho
>
> Could people with scsi tapes please try the following:
>
< Text deleted....... >
>
> I always get different files and I want to know if its somewhere in my
> hardware or in the scsi-tape support.
> My setup is:
> - asus PCI/I-486SP3 motherboard with ncr53c810 on board
> - hp C1553A DAT tape (Rev: 9503)
> - conner cfp 1060s (with patched firmware)
> - both, the original linux driver and the bsd-driver port show this error
> - scsi tape as module
>
> I doubt that the tape is defect, because (as far as I know) DATs always check
> the data after it is written, so I assume that the data is already wrong
> when it reaches the tape. The scsi bus seems reliable to me because the
> harddisc works fine and the bsd ncrdriver uses parity (and I got no parity
> errors so far). The conclusion is that there is a bug somewhere in the
> linux scsi-tape code, but I'm not sure.
>
> Matthias

Mathias,

I have the following configuration:
- 486-PSD-IO motherboard with builtin NCR 53c810 and IDE controller
- 486/DX2 66 MHz CPU
- 32 MB of memory (4 - 4x36-60ns)
- SoundBlaster 16 sound card
- 3c503 Ethernet card (thinnet)
- Paradise S3 864 PCI graphic card (2 MB)
- I/O card with 2 - 16550A serial ports
- Acer 56L 15" monitor
- Cardinal 28.8Kb modem
SCSI devices (IDE is disabled)
- CONNER Model: CFP1060S 1.05GB Rev: 213C (patched up, of course)
- FUJITSU Model: M2684S-512 Rev: 2026
- QUANTUM Model: PD210S Rev: 527
- TOSHIBA Model: CD-ROM XM-3401TA Rev: 2873
- CIPHER Model: ST150S2 (QIC150) Rev: G76M
Short list of software used:
- RedHat 2.1 Linux Nov 1995 distribution (ELF with some a.out)
- kernel 1.3.91

I backup three disk partitions about once a week to three QIC-250
cartridge tapes on the Cipher drive using the tar utility. Each of
these tapes is than compared against its original disk partition.
Total amount of data backed up: ~ 700 MBytes.

When I configured the NCR 53c810 driver in the kernel to 10 MHz
Fast-SCSI and to always negotiate synchronous transfers, I get some
tape compare errors: about one error every ~ 50 MBytes. If I
change only the speed to 5 MHz with disconnect support, No errors
occurred in the data comparisons with good tapes.

The Cipher tape drive is fairly old, but still works very well.

Cheers!

Bill

-- 
William M. Perkins                       Internet - wperkins@us.net
The Greenwood                               or    - bill@cais.com
Commodore is dead.  Long lives the Amiga!  (AmigaOS/Linux/NetBSD)