... on my Red Hat 6.1 system, anyway: As I noted in earlier postings, I've been unable to get the "po" subdirectory of ftape-tools to compile successfully. Because of this, I'm still using the old "mt" utility with ftape-4.x-1999_09_11. Maybe that's a problem, because when I execute "mt erase" under a background shell script before writing my tar archive on the tape, it abnormally terminates, and ftape records errors galore. This is basically what ftape 3.04 was doing, so maybe the problem all along has been with "mt erase" and not ftape 3.04, I don't know. Right now, I have a tar archive dumping to tape in what appears to be a normal run, but I had to run "mt erase" manually first, and remove it from the script. Of course, the archive isn't done yet either ... The frustrating thing is, not only do Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 have no problems with this Iomega 3200 tape drive, but my old Red Hat 5.1 rescue disk set with ftape 2.08 is as solid as a rock too. So I'm pretty sure the problem is software, but so far, it's hard to tell whether it's Red Hat 6.1 (kernel 2.2.12-20), "mt", or "enhancements" to ftape since 2.08. If I have further problems, I'll probably just use ftape 2.08 for all my backups. It's just not worth it to continue to try to debug these "more advanced" versions, or linux itself, whichever is at fault ... In the meantime, if anyone has a clue what happened to my ftape-tools compile (see earlier posts), please let me know. There's a chance they might restore some sanity to all this if I can ever build them ... Thanks, Jim
