The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: -*-*- Proper SCSI mt (ex- mt-st package) (fwd)



Arrigo has been discussing this issue with me and rather than parphrase
his comments I thought it better to simply present them.
Is there some way that we can deal with this issue. For those with DAT
drives this is a non-trivial problem.

Thanks,

Dwarf
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aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 656-9769
      Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road
      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 20:41:12 +0100
From: Arrigo Triulzi <a.triulzi@ic.ac.uk>
To: Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>
Subject: Re: -*-*- Proper SCSI mt (ex- mt-st package)

Dale Scheetz scripsit:
|I'm not sure that I understand the issue, but if you explain it to me I
|will be glad to pass it on. I will be more convincing if I know what I'm
|talking about ;-)

OK ;-) What I am ranting about is the handling of SCSI DAT/DDS/DDS-2
tape drives. GNU mt does not use the correct ioctls when accessing
/dev/st*, for example a simple mt status returns quite a bit of
garbage for the drive status flags, etc. Also, it does not support the
setting of particular options, once again the ioctl used is wrong, for
example scsi2logical which enables you to use logical as opposed to
physical positioning commands, can-bsr which means that the tape can
backspace records reliably (most DAT drives can, except perhaps the
oldest). Another nightmare is erase which isn't quite right and takes
60m with GNU and under 10s with the proper mt-st.

The issue is that, basically, GNU mt is useless for anyone using SCSI
DAT/DDS/DDS-2 drives, whereas mt-st which was written by the chap who
actually wrote st.c in $LINUXSRC/drivers/scsi does. The problem is
that the mt-st package which existed (I installed it on my old 1.2
before zapping it upgrading to 1.3) with Debian is gone and you end up
with GNU mt which is in the cpio package and is useless, especially
if, like me, you need to change hardware blocking factors on the drive
to be able to read/write tapes written on different hardware/os
combinations. Only mt-st stsetoptions works with DAT drives, the GNU
mt stsetoptions doesn't.

I hope this clarifies the issue - basically we are keeping GNU mt
which is very pretty indeed but doesn't support lots of Linux hardware
and dumping the BSD-derived mt-st which does.

TIA,

	Arrigo



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