solaris/sunos4.1.?/tar problems
Fredrick Backman
We have some 8 mm exabyte tapes that contains backups taken under sunos
4.1.?. Now we have "upgraded" to solaris 2.3, and when we try to read
these tapes - on the same can - tar presents some "tar: tape blocksize
error" - stuff.
There are no probems writing and reading new tapes under solaris, but
the older backups does at times become valuable, so we would really like
to be able to read them...
Anybody have any ideas?
/Roffe.
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Vincent Masquelier
Backman) wrote:
Hello,
Try to specify the blocking size of your old tapes
$> tar xvfb 20 ...
The default block size under SunOS is 20, but is only 1 under Solaris
Vincent MASQUELIER
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Vincent Masquelier
Hello,
You should specify the block size. Under SunOS, the default block size is
20. But under Solaris, the default block size is 1.
So use the b option for tar --> tar xvbf 20 ...
Joerg Schilling
>We have some 8 mm exabyte tapes that contains backups taken under sunos
>4.1.?. Now we have "upgraded" to solaris 2.3, and when we try to read
>these tapes - on the same can - tar presents some "tar: tape blocksize
>error" - stuff.
>
>There are no probems writing and reading new tapes under solaris, but
>the older backups does at times become valuable, so we would really like
>to be able to read them...
How did you write the tapes under SunOS 4.x???
The message 'tar: tape blocksize error' comes when the record size on tape
is not a multiple of 512 Bytes.
Did you use compress or a pipe to dd or similar when writing the tape?
Tar itself will not write tapes with illegal blocksizes.
I have no problems when reading 8mm tar tapes from 4.x on 2.3.
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Michael Joosten
>
>Under SunOS, the default block size is
>20. But under Solaris, the default block size is 1.
Does anyone know why this was changed? All the other OSs I've used,
including a few SysV variants, use 20 as the default blocking factor.
Making Solaris different is a real pain, and will impact the perfor-
That varies. 'Pure' SysV tars apparently only use bs=1 by default, as
e.g. an old Pyramid with OSx 4.4/5.1 in att universe. Some companies have
apparently decided this to be infinitely stupid and adopted the way BSD tar
does it. Doing bs=1 with a fast 1/2" magtape is really a fun to hear...
"Ah, Unix, which one do you mean? Flavour? Why? There are as many flavours as
there Unices..." 8-(
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