[ale] SCSI tape

[Stephan Uphoff]

> And I DEFINATELY am worried that "kill -9" won't kill it....

Relax - this is normal.

Kill will signal the process.
Unfortunately the erase ioctl is not interruptible.

If your drive goes dead without a scsi bus reset you might have
to wait for 31 hours for "mt erase" to return with an error.
( scsi timeout for this command)

There are just a few SCSI commands that normally take a long time
and have timeouts like this.

There is the question on how to interrupt an erase command and
how to restart the command since not all signals terminate a process.
.. so I guess it makes sense to not make it UN-interruptible.



> I *THINK* it's forever.  I'll try it again.
> And I DEFINATELY am worried that "kill -9" won't kill it....
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Stephan Uphoff <ups at tree.com>
> To: David Corbin <dcorbin at csol.com>
> Cc: <ale at ale.org>; <ups at tree.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 1999 2:30 PM
> Subject: Re: [ale] SCSI tape
> 
> 
> >
> > Erasing a tape takes some time - the process issues a SCSI command and
> > just waits until the drive is done.
> >
> > There is a compile option in the driver to send a SCSI command where
> > the tape drive returns status as soon as it starts the operation.
> > ( It does not wait for the erase to complete 0> "mt erase"
> >  returns immediately)
> > It will still take forever to erase the tape.
> > (Next mt commands will probably fail with BUSY status)
> >
> > What is the problem ?
> >
> > Is your forever really a forever and the tape does not get erased ?
> > Erasing should not take longer than writing a whole tape.
> >
> > Stephan
> >
> > > I've a SCSI tape drive running on a RedHat 6.0 system.  It works OK, but
> > > I do have one problem.  When I use "mt erase", it "runs forever".  I
> can't
> > > even kill the process with a "kill -9".
> > >
> > > ideas?
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>