> 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).

why didn't you either upgrade the version of RedHat you were using to
something less ancient or just upgrade the kernel on that box?