Hello Kevin

Actually, I've been getting a spate of status 85's recently with AIT2 drives.

Each time it occurs, it seems to be one tape causing the problem on multiple
drives till it freezes out.   Comparing with my notes, each of the tapes that
has caused these problems had been degaussed three times as the tapes that
expire from our mail pool get degaussed and relabelled before returning to the
scratch pool.

I suspect that degaussing is not a good thing with AIT2, unfortunately the
default behaviour to the erase command for AIT2 is to only erase the first 300
bytes, the AIT manual says that if the least significant bit of the second byte
of the SCSI command descriptor block for the erase command is a one, it will
erase the entire tape but I have no idea how to issue an erase command with that
bit flipped on Solaris and so far no answer from the Comp.sys.sun.admin
newsgroup either.   We have a policy of rendering the tapes unreadable for mail
folder backups after the seventh day, no if's ands or buts allowed, the client
wishes to limit their liability in legal matters.

Regards,
John I Wang
Sr. Systems Engineer
Steverson Information Professionals

---
Enron Broadband Services
3 Allen Center 3AC872e
ph (713) 345-6863




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|        |          global.com    |
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|        |          01/11/01 11:08|
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  |                                                                       |
  |       To:     veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu                      
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  |       cc:     (bcc: John Wang/Contractor/Enron Communications)        |
  |       Subject:     RE: [Veritas-bu] FW: media write errors - 84       |
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Next question: is any one on the list having frequent error 84 on drives
other than DLT 7000 (DLT 8000, Sony AIT, AIT2, etc.)?

...