FC2 and tape drives.

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Juan Pablo Claude wrote:
> Greetings out there:
> 
>     I have revived an old PC (Pentium II 350 MHz) to use as a home 
> server and I installed FC2 on it. I have also installed a couple of tape 
> drives to use for backup. One is an HP Colorado T3000, attached as a 
> sole device to the on-board floppy disk controller. This drive works 
> fine after I recompiled the kernel to include the ftape and zftape 
> modules, and can be accessed as /dev/qft0 as expected. The issue is with 
> the other drive, a Tecmar/Iomega Ditto Max Professional. This drive has 
> an ISA plug-and-play accelerator board (Ditto Dash MX). Right now, the 
> drive is not accessible, as I did not compile the ftape module to access 
> the accelerator board (I had trouble doing that previously). However, I 
> understand that ftape can support up to four  devices. Does anyone know 
> of a way to activate both drives? I would really like to use the Tecmar 
> drive as it is faster and has a higher capacity. Ultimately, the best 
> scenario would be to be able to use both.
> 
>     The ftape documentation is outdated and somewhat intractable. I 
> would appreciate any help you could give me. Thanks.

The ftape documentation, while old, should still contain correct data on 
the tape drives it supports.  It was written to provide support for the 
old Colorado 40MB and then 80MB taoe devices, which support the QIC-113 
so called "floppy tape" standard.  This includes the QIC-40 and QIC-80 
formats that Colorado used.  It was extended to try and support every 
tape drive out there, but some manufacturers (like IOmega) thought they 
could grab market share by using proprietary tape formats and protocols 
that gave them a slight capacity edge (including using patented 
technologies).  Then as tape drive capacity increased, it becam 
unfeasable to continue to use the Floppy drive interface (it was just 
plain too slow, even with the accelerator cards), so the Travan 
compatible drives (at least the later ones) started to migrate to the 
IDE controller and FTape was no longer needed.

The old FTape home page still exists (I was just there) at:

http://www.instmath.rwth-aachen.de/~heine/ftape/

It has a last modified date of July 20, 2000, which means no work has 
been done on that WWW site since then.  I found some of the links on 
this page were broken, but I did find the following in a 1997 version of 
the FTAPE-HOWTO:

> 4.4 Is the Iomega Ditto Max drive supported?
> 
> Yes, if you are using version ftape-4.02 or later of the Ftape drivers from the Ftape Home Page or from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/tapes.
> 
> <answer from Claus Heine>
> 
> 4.5 Is the Iomega Ditto Max Pro drive supported?
> 
> Yes. But if you want to use the 5GB (10GB with compression) cartridges you don't need it. With ftape there doesn't seem to be any difference between the Ditto Max and the Ditto Max Pro.
> 
> <answer from Claus Heine>

I haven't used FTape in years (at least 5 of them!).  Not since my 
Exabyte Eagle tape drive overheated and died....

If you are going to access more than 1 tape drive on the same cable, you 
may need to set a device select jumper on one or more of the drives. 
This, of course, is a drive dependant thing.  If you do it right, you 
should be able to use /dev/ft0 & /dev/ft1 (or /dev/qft0 & /dev/qft1).  YMMV.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us