Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:15:41 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Sam <freep@thecity.sfsu.edu>, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: "tape is now frozen" Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0008282211050.36166-100000@beppo.feral.com> In-Reply-To: <20000829131721.R11422@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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> > I've lost the *exact* position. In fact, I'm not even sure I've lost > the exact position, but I'm prepared to concede that. Within a block > or so I know where I am. > You cannot know that. > > The whole point of rewind, eom or offline is to bring the tape to a > > *known* place. Spacing one filemark is not sufficient. > > Why not? We know we're at the beginning (or end) of a file. I have fifty files of *almost* identical data. If I think I'm at file 43, but I'm at file 42, that's wrong. If tape position has been lost, it's been lost. It's more than a "little bit" pregnant. It's just barely possible to concede that a (successful) report of hardware block position could be construed as "setting location". But this also means that all other notions of file location can not be known any more. > Well, no, I state it above. > > > It has occurred because there was an I/O error, or you're not using > > the tape correctly (fixed block mode and you don't issue the correct > > read size). > > Precisely. But that's not a reason to penalize people by making them > wind from one end of the tape to the other. Argh!!!!! I just plain don't agree, Greg. I'm sorry. If you don't know what the blocksize is, switch to variable mode. Even then- what's the big deal. You're not in the middle of the tape- you're at the front of the tape if you don't know. I really don't want to change this behaviour. It's wrong to allow people to do things that would encourage data lossage. -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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