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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!newsfeed.direct.ca!nntp.portal.ca!news.bc.net!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Exabyte TR-3 Eagle Tape Drives Date: 1 Feb 1997 22:54:41 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 36 Message-ID: <5d0hjh$2u5@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <01bc0f29$1bda5320$010211ac@bambi.fmsc.com.au> <5ctn2t$21q@nntp1.best.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:34868 howard@nntp.best.com (Howard Lew) wrote: > I too would be interested in such a driver as I have one of those drives > too, but I am not sure how to port a driver... You apparently don't know what you're talking about. :-)) The existing ft driver has already scared away three serious developers, since handling a tape drive abusing an FDC is such a horrible task... Let alone `porting' it from another system, which is plain impossible unless you're also going to revamp the entire floppy disk driver. You might use the Linux driver as a reference, but in the end, you would really rewrite the driver from scratch for FreeBSD. This is not true for drivers that have been designed to be multi-homed, but for something like floppy disk or tape handling, that'll be the net result. If it were so much simpler, be sure, somebody would have already taken over that task. Right now, the bang/buck ratio, i.e. the usefulness of the result vs. the time to spend getting the task done, is below any useful limit. Unless you've got too many hours of spare time to burn, buying a decent drive will leave you with a much more reliable and much faster backup solution which makes you forget the additional bucks after half a year of usage. Using a floppy tape for serious backups is something i sometimes kiddingly refer to as an ``expensive /dev/null''. You can always feed something into it... but shouldn't be surprised to see just an EOF only when reading from there. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)