[NTLUG:Discuss] SCSI problems

[Steve Baker]

Cameron wrote:

> Why not help solve the problem?  Let the cdrecord developers know that
> you get lockups with your drives.  Hopefully, with your input, they can
> pinpoint the problem and fix it.  My 2 cents.  8)

You are absolutely right.

I've been *TRYING* to do that for a week or more.  The author mostly
gives me single line replies of the form "Your drive is faulty".

However, my drive writes just fine using cdwrite (which hasn't been
maintained in over 5 years - aparently) - and I can read data when it's
mounted as a regular CD-ROM - but *not* when I ask cdrecord to read it.
That doesn't sound like a hardware problem to me.

I've written a half dozen emails to the guy in an attempt to convey
this coherently - but his last reply was decidedly hostile - accusing
me of being a newbie who didn't understand the subtleties of software
debugging (Yep - I'm one of those newbies with only 25 years of programming
experience - all under UNIX, Minix and Linux).  He claiming that "user
level programs cannot possibly lock up the system" (remember that
cdrecord has to run with root privilage) - and hence it couldn't
possibly be the fault of cdrecord.

When I protested, he said I should have spent more time searching
the web for a solution (evidently a week of messing around prior
to posting to him wasn't enough)....Finally, he said that he'd
"deduced" that it had to be a kernel fault (which seems pretty
unlikely to me given the circumstances) - and that I should take
the matter up with the kernel group.  That may or may not be good
advice - but I wouldn't know where to start explaining what the
problem is at the kernel level.  They'd (rightly) want a lot more
details than I could provide.

So, I'd like to get this problem fixed properly - but I'm afraid the
attitude of the author of cdrecord is such that he'll never admit it's
his fault unless I could explain the precise point of failure in his
sources. Since it locks up my machine so hard that it needs a
reboot - and I know nothing of raw SCSI programming, my chances of
finding that out in short order are minimal.

So, I settled for emailing the author of the 'HOWTO' guide with
a suggestion that he add a footnote to the effect that people
having problems with old HP 6020 or Phillips 2600 drives might
like to try 'cdwrite'.

Still, I have a working drive for as long as 'cdwrite' runs on
newer kernels...that's good enough for me.

This has not been one of my better OpenSource experiences. :-(

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)