Later, I would expect to be able to access, say, archive3 via the fsf directive to skip over the first two archives. What is the correct sequence?
st -f /dev/nrst0 rewind st -f /dev/nrst0 fsf 2 tar -xf /dev/rst0 {files} 5.4.8 : Since the Viper 150 writes on QIC-150/120, I guess I don’t need to worry about writing variable-length records? How about reading a tape written with variable-length records. Is this possible with the Viper? If so, what’s involved? Who would have written it? 🙂 Presently you can’t. You`re right. Don’t worry about it. The new ‘st’ changes will change this somewhat, though. 5.4.9 : The very scant documentation that came with my drive mentions a “selectable buffer disconnect size,” whose default is 16K. This is evidently the “maximum number of bytes that can be sent over the SCSI bus during a single data transfer phase.” What’s that? How is it connected st’s “blocksize” command? Do I want to use 16K blocks, or might I even want to set the disconnect size to a higher value? This suggests that 32 512 blocks will be written at a time. This jives with the tape format for some of the lower density cartridges (QIC
