Aphonlab.448
net.wanted
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!sdcarl!sdcattb!sdcatta!phonlab!donn
Sun Apr  4 19:07:22 1982
A tar that recovers from tape errors
A month or two ago I made a fairly major revision to our local 4.1BSD
tar to allow sensible recovery from most tape error problems.  I didn't
do this out of altruism -- our main software archive tape managed to
develop 4 parity errors and we couldn't retrieve our old sources.  The
new version dealt with the archive tape handily and seems to cope with
directory checksum errors as well.  (For the latter it uses two stra-
tegies: if the user requests it, it will display bad headers and ask
users whether to believe them, and if not or in the default case it will
scan the tape looking for the next good header.) It has some code that
uses the 4.1BSD tape driver to determine the severity of errors, which
has never been rigorously tested and could probably be dropped by non-
4.1 sites...  If anyone is interested I could send them the diffs or
post them to net.sources.  There is also a revised manual page, natch.
                               Donn Seeley
                               ucbvax!ucsfcgl!sdcarl!sdchema!donn
                               ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
                               (the latter route is normally preferred
                               but sdcsvax is currently broken.. )

-----------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <[email protected]>
of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/


This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.