Correct use of bind and fs/tarfs?

[Steve Kotsopoulos steve@ecf.toronto.edu]

Frank Ashford <fashford@crl.com> wrote:
> I've got an Archive Viper 150 Meg QIC drive attached to an Adaptec 1542C
> that I am able to move the tape around using scuzz.  I want to start reading
> and writing data to it from rc.  I did the following -->
> 
> I am able to bind the SCSI controller with:
> 	bind '#S' /dev
> 
> This produces directories 0 though 7 and scsiid in my /dev directory.
> I get no errors from:
> 	fs/tarfs -m /n/tapefs /dev/3
> I am unable to:
> 	tar -cvf /n/tapefs *
> Have I missed something completely?

Perhaps. My reading of the manpages tells me that tarfs can be used to
mount a tape read-only as a file system. Thus, if you have a tar-format
tape, you could mount it with tarfs and then use cd, grep, diff and other
traditional tools to look around on the tape and grab whatever you want.
In this way, tarfs and family is a lot like ftpfs - they give you
a filesystem-oriented way of looking at things that people don't usually
think of as filesystems; this is Plan 9 after all.

To write the tape, you'll have to use tar, not tarfs. Also, you'll probably
want a slightly higher-level interface that scsi(3), as it requires you
to send the commands and data using separate files. Read the manual for
scuzz(8), which seems to be more suited to the task.

I haven't tried any of the above, so don't take it as gospel. I've been
using u9fs to copy files to a Unix system (boo, hiss) for backup.