>What I used to use is a program called dds2index under linux, which creates an
> index of a tar archive with the actual (absolute) tape block numbers occupied
> by each file. ...
>What I thought of now is to enhance the amverify utility to not just read the
>(tar) archives but create such an index to be appended to tape. ...
Note that you're limiting yourself to tar backups. This won't work for
anything system dump because it cannot be started in the middle.
Also, I doubt it will work if the image is software compressed.
>The only thing
> I don't know is if such a fast seek functionality is supported by other drive
> technologies besides DAT ...
I suspect many drive types support it, but the other question is, does
the OS? For instance, Solaris does not have a command line way to issue
the raw SCSI commands needed (neither does AIX). It might be possible
to write new code with the Solaris 8 sgen driver (and similar access on
other systems), but would be very OS dependent. Look at what the new
chg-scsi code has to go through.
I'm certainly not opposed to new capabilities, but please make sure all
the caveats are well documented.
>Urban
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
