> I recently posted a question about my attempts to get 2.4.4p1 running on a > RedHat 7.0 box. I probably didn't mention that the plan was to go tapeless. > This project didn't work and I can explain exactly why so others won't bump > into the same wall I did. > > 2.4.4p1 compiles just fine on RedHat 7.0 which is a 2.2 kernel. This kernel > doesn't have big file support. The file: device also works great. The > problem is that while you can create large *tapes* on disk, you can't write > large *tape files* on the tape since it is created in a file system that has > a 2G limit. > > I actually ran into this with the holding disk but used the chunksize > workaround to get past it without giving thought to what that meant later in > the process when taper was running.... I guess I was too close to the > problem and the errors pointed in lots of other places. It wasn't until a > coworker was asking about the problems and I mentioned a list of DLEs with > the problem and thinking of the list mused "...in fact, almost everything > larger than about 2 G is giving an error of some type." This person > suggested I run a test to see if a 2.2G file could be created on the host > and it could not which made the problem rather obvious. > > Turns out that the problems all went away with SuSE 8.1 (kernel 2.4.19). > > In addition I can also verify that this same kernel has built in support for > the Promise Ultra 133 TX2 card and will support a 200G IDE drive (Maxtor > Diamond Max +9).
why didn't you either upgrade the version of RedHat you were using to something less ancient or just upgrade the kernel on that box?