[ale] Tar and end of tape

[Greg Freemyer]

On 12/17/05, Howard A Story <adrin at haswes.homelinux.org> wrote:
> Greg Freemyer wrote:
>
> >My tar backups have started hitting the end of tape.
> >
> >I'm using a LTO-1 drive which does compression on the fly so the
> >amount of data a tape holds varies based on the data content.
> >
> >Does anyone know a way to tell tar to proceed to the next tape without
> >having to artificially restrict the tapes capacity.  ie. tell tar that
> >a tape holds 150 GB because your sure it can hold at least that much.
> >
> >FYI: I used to run my tar backups thru a little known program called
> >mbuffer.  This used to work and handle the tape swapping, but since I
> >upgraded to SUSE 10, it fails.
> >
> >Thanks
> >Greg
> >--
> >Greg Freemyer
> >The Norcross Group
> >Forensics for the 21st Century
> >_______________________________________________
> >Ale mailing list
> >Ale at ale.org
> >http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> >
> >
> Hey,
> Have you tried the man pages.   You know "man woman"   hehehehe
>
> There are some options -L and -M, but I have not tried this.  I have the
> same problem.  It is on my do later list.   Most of the backup programs
> I have seen try to be to complex.  I just want to write to the tape,
> not make a database.
>
> Adrin

-L does not allow for tape drives that compress.  -M was not working.

I think my problem is a buggy kernel.  Looking in /var/warn I see an
error about can't write End of File.  I started a test with a vanilla
2.6.14 kernel as left work Friday.  I'll see how it went tomorrow.  If
it doesn't work I will try the latest 2.6.15 rc.

FYI: I was using SuSE 10.0 based on 2.6.13 kernel.

Greg
--
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century