Re: SCSI Tape hangs when no tape loaded (2.5.6x)

[Ruud Linders <rkmp@xs4all.nl>]

Kai,

That did it !

I was running mt-st-0.5b, upgrading to 0.7 fixed the 'mt' command as
well as the 'stinit' command which caused my boot to delay for 2 minutes
as that was called from the boot scripts.

THanks
 >On Sun, 16 Feb 2003, Ruud Linders wrote:
 >
 >>
 >>
 >> On both 2.5.60 and 2.5.61 when there is no tape loaded in my SCSI DAT
 >> tape drive, access to the drive blocks for exactly 2 minutes
 >> before timing out and giving an I/O error.
 >>
 >> # mt stat
 >> ....... < 2 minutes later > ...
 >> /dev/tape: Input/output error
 >>
 >Does you mt open the tape device with the O_NONBLOCK option? If not, this
 >is what is expected. mt-st version >= 0.6 does use this option. I don't
 >know about other mt's.
 >
 >The open() behaviour of st was changed at 2.5.3 to conform with SUS
 >(blocking) and what the other Unices do (timeout). If the device is opened
 >without O_NONBLOCK, the driver waits for some time (default 2 minutes) for
 >the device to become ready. If it does not become ready, an error is 
returned.
 >
 >	Kai
 >
 >P.S. I just tested 2.5.61 and in my system 'mt status' without tape in
 >the drive works as expected (i.e., prints status immediately).
 >