termination and cabling question

[Brian Ristuccia]

On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Desmond A. Kirkpatrick wrote:

> The fact that I saw NO warnings in the logs makes me extremely careful
> about SCSI termination.  Especially while doing backups, make sure you
> are in a KNOWN-GOOD termination situation (e.g, I remove my ZIP when
> backing up).  The _only_ evidence I had of questionable termination in
> either situation was a tape drive that didn't quite stream and
> intermittent corruption.

All the more reason to verify backups after they are complete. (take the
sum or md5sum of each file immediately before it is archived onto the
tape, and compare it with the sums of the files on tape after the archive
is complete and the tape rewound).

There's a little program floating around to which you redirect the stderr
of GNU tar that performs this check.

-Brian Ristuccia
 brianr at osiris.ml.org
 bristucc at baynetworks.com
 bristucc at cs.uml.edu