[1244] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Re: 8mm tape drive failing; AFS backup was not done
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Krikorian)
Tue Feb 15 02:08:20 1994
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 94 02:06:24 -0500
From: David Krikorian <dkk@MIT.EDU>
Cc: sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU, charon-maintainers@MIT.EDU, rtfm-maintainers@MIT.EDU,
sipb-staff@MIT.EDU, sipb-ec@MIT.EDU
Sorry for taking 2 weeks to reply.
This message concerns the SIPB office Exabyte drive, an 8mm
helical-scan device which is based on Sony's camcorder tape mechanism.
As one of the sources of SIPB's exabyte, let me give some background.
The SIPB exabyte was Athena's first. I was on Systems Support staff
at the time, and dealt with ordering 1 drive up front, and another 4
later, for when we had a backup procedure in place. (In practice,
most of Athena's backups for a while were done in the SIPB office,
because we didn't have a reasonable alternative.) As such, that tape
drive is the oldest of its kind in w20 or e40. I think the slightly
newer ones in e40 have been decommissioned. (Matt?)
Peter Roden was the Manager of Operations at the time, and loaned the
drive to SIPB for the usual reasons that new or unique hardware is
sent to SIPB: to have lots of enthusiastic hackers with spare time
figure out how to get the stuff to work. We didn't have a SCSI bus on
any Operations-run computers, anyway, so we couldn't use the thing.
CLEANING
The next 4 drives, which became the workhorses of Athena backups, were
not cleaned for quite a while. At one point, I tried to use a
cleaning tape (the official Exabyte brand), and the drives immediately
started to fail, presumably *because* of the cleaning. My best guess
is that the cleaning tape freed up the crud that had been building up
in the drives. I don't remember how many times we had to run cleaning
tapes through before the drives recovered. A "real" cleaning, done
properly with swabs and solvent (no, I've never done it on an Exabyte)
would probably do a lot more good in heavy cleaning than a mere
cleaning tape.
SERVICE
We (IS) purchased the drives with no service contract. Perhaps one of
the MIT-wide contracts covers the drive, but I wouldn't count on it.
