I recently posted a question about my attempts to get 2.4.4p1 running on a
RedHat 7.0 box.  I probably didn't mention that the plan was to go tapeless.
This project didn't work and I can explain exactly why so others won't bump
into the same wall I did.

2.4.4p1 compiles just fine on RedHat 7.0 which is a 2.2 kernel.  This kernel
doesn't have big file support.  The file: device also works great.  The
problem is that while you can create large *tapes* on disk, you can't write
large *tape files* on the tape since it is created in a file system that has
a 2G limit.  

I actually ran into this with the holding disk but used the chunksize
workaround to get past it without giving thought to what that meant later in
the process when taper was running....  I guess I was too close to the
problem and the errors pointed in lots of other places.  It wasn't until a
coworker was asking about the problems and I mentioned a list of DLEs with
the problem and thinking of the list mused "...in fact, almost everything
larger than about 2 G is giving an error of some type."  This person
suggested I run a test to see if a 2.2G file could be created on the host
and it could not which made the problem rather obvious.  

Turns out that the problems all went away with SuSE 8.1 (kernel 2.4.19).  

In addition I can also verify that this same kernel has built in support for
the Promise Ultra 133 TX2 card and will support a 200G IDE drive (Maxtor
Diamond Max +9).


Dana Bourgeois