Hi all;

I'm having some issues with attempting to work out a 'how much is left 
on this tape' scenario, and having a fixed block size of 32K on the 
tape so that an mt tell gives a reasonable and consistent value that 
can be used for these calculations.  And I'm apparently having 
trouble when a setblk 0 is in effect.

The relative merits of setblk vs defblksize in setting these two 
parameters needs to be discussed/defined for the users again.

For instance, attempting to do an 'mt -f /dev/ice defblksize' of 
anything other than 512 bytes renders the tape unreadable by amanda.  
Or dd for that matter until you hit the magic twanger by resetting it 
to whatever was in effect at the time the tape was last written.

So, regardless of the danger of repeating a 2 year old discussion, can 
we have that discussion again from the real experts?  I've 
re-installed enough times that those threads are gone from my own 
mail archives, and maybe some of the rest of us could use a refresher 
on this subject too.

Many thanks for any clarification that the amanda authors can do here.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.26% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.