Rational/R1000s400/Logbook/2012

2012-09-27

Scanned in the "Guru Course" material while hosting COMAL kickoff meeting. Sheet-feeding scanners are a good thing.

I have started a new wiki page for the documentation: Rational/R1000s400/Documentation

2012-08-30

The 8200 Ole brought was from an IBM RS/6000, and either because of special firmware/settings or fault on that drive, it refused to do anything more advanced than a SCSI Inquiry and Test-Unit-Ready.

In the end I wrote a set of tapes on the known-suspect 8200 drive, and test-read them on the known-good 8505 drive with success.

I have now, finally, convinced myself that I have written good copies of Pierre-Alains tapes, and more importantly, that I can do so again, if the Exabyte drive in the R1000 cannot read them for reasons of alignment etc.

Received email from Grek Bek with answers to a lot of my questions, so now next thing on the program is to find a corner with power and space to set up the machine. This probably involves moving other stuff out of the way, so it may take some weeks.

2012-08-16

Read Pierre-Alains original tapes on the EXB-8505 drive, and got the exact same result as the read on the EXB-8200 drive, so now the originals can go back to Pierre-Alain.

Failed utterly to make 8200 read a tape written on the 8505.

Ole has promised to bring in a known good 8200 drive, that will be next attempt.

2012-08-09

Spent tonight trying to write copies of the tapes I read last thursday.

The Exabyte 8200 drive I have used has clearly shown itself to be faulty, or at the very least flakey.

Tried using a 8505 drive instead, but worry that it may have used compression while writing the tapes.

Plan:

1. Re-read Pierre-Alains tapes with 8505 to check that on-disk copy is a good read. I have no reason to doubt this, based on my analysis, but I want to be 100% sure before I return the tapes to Pierre-Alain.

2. Try to read the tapes I wrote tonight with flakey 8200 drive. If it can read (some of) them, they are not compressed.

2012-08-02

Tonight I set up a FreeBSD computer with an ExaByte 8200 tapedrive, and used it to read the three tapes Pierre-Alain Muller mailed me last month.

The tapes have a rather complex block structure, and I have read them in using a program which also stores the information about block-sizes, tape-marks etc, so that it should be possible to write exact copies of the tapes to install from.

The result are three files:

 -rw-r--r--  1 phk   wheel  41837637 Aug  2 18:19 20120802_R1000_CATALOG
 -rw-r--r--  1 phk   wheel  13141316 Aug  2 18:20 20120802_R1000_DFS
 -rw-r--r--  1 phk   wheel  78362000 Aug  2 18:23 20120802_R1000_ENVIRONMENT

 MD5 (20120802_R1000_CATALOG) = 6102fb4c10fa580af4fb0e508cfd4127
 MD5 (20120802_R1000_DFS) = 5e61879f066484cacdd1e895cea65b41
 MD5 (20120802_R1000_ENVIRONMENT) = dce495e2b575e8aeae3da79e9fce8074