hi i would like to mention that several kind people have replied to my post about the troubles with the iomega 2gig floppy tape drive. thank you very very much! i'm going to try your suggestions and reply to each of you. i really appreciate the time you took to answer. just fyi, the reason i haven't replied yet is that disaster struck my system somehow, during the process of installing and uninstalling ftape, recompiling the kernel several times, first with then without ftape support, etc. in other words, undoing and redoing all the steps several times over. suddenly, i could not telnet or ftp to my system. ARRGH! it took a couple of days to track down the problem. somehow a file had gotten created in the /dev directory that was a regular file, not a block or char device file, with a name like tqty or something. and one of the processes that is started by login was looking at this as the first available port, but it didnt meet security. so connections just failed. but the only message i was getting was that the utmp file could not be found. (it was there of course). wow. i'd still be stuck without help from a friend (tracy reed, thank you tracy). so ftape experimenters, beware! anyway, now its back to the tape drive as i have some more options to try. thanks again, sadhu
