I have an Exabyte 8700 (8mm) drive.  I issued one of the compression
commands for mt-dds (I cannot recall which; probably either a query or a
call to turn the compression off).  The system immediately locked solid.
Ctrl-Alt-Del did not recover it.  I ended up having to press the reset
button.

This is, of course, not good.

It is, of course, not good for your system to have locked up... but I can't
help asking why you would expect a package that claims to work only with DDS
tape drives to work with an Exabyte 8mm drive?  The whole point of the dds2tar
package is to exploit features that are specific to the DDS (4mm) tape standard
that allow for fast-forward of the tape to a known position to speed retrieval.

Chasing this down is going to be essentially impossible for me since I don't
have an Exabyte.  In fact, the only non-DDS drive I have is an old QIC-150
Archive.  I will, at some point, experiment with that drive and see if I can
duplicate the symptom.  It may be that dds2tar can be "hardened" to better
detect whether it's being asked to talk to a DDS device before it starts
issuing "dangerous" SCSI commands.  We'll see...

I'm going to downgrade this bug to normal severity, since there are no reports
of the package causing any trouble when used with the kinds of tape drive it
is designed to work with... and getting nagged about it more often isn't going
to get it worked on any faster.

Bdale

Hi.  As you may recall, I maintain the dds2tar package for Debian GNU/Linux.
One of our users has reported a "bug" where dds2tar caused a system lockup when
it was used on a non-DDS tape drive.  While this is obviously outside the scope
of the program's intended use, causing a system lockup is unfriendly, and it
seems that it would be nice if dds2tar could be "hardened" by trying to find
out if it's really a DDS drive before performing DDS-only operations.  What
do you think?

The complete text of the report can be found at

http://www.debian.org/Bugs/

by looking up bug number 25408.

Please preserve the CC in any replies so that our bug tracking system can keep
a copy of the conversation.

Bdale