[NTLUG:Discuss] Tape Update - Parallel Port Dead???

[Stephen Davidson]

Greetings.

Well, it seems that I have solved the mystery of why I can't get my tape 
drive to work, the parallel port seems to be offline.  At the Linux fair 
today, I was trying to get the Parallel Printer on my FileServer (and 
older AMD 2Ghz) to work, and ran into what appears to be a kernel 
issue.  This is on OpenSuSE 10.0.  (Many thanks to Wayne for agreeing to 
work with me offline to solve this!).  Well, just for the fun of it, 
decided to try on my laptop, which is also running OpenSuSE 10.0.  I did 
not get the "FIFO" issue that we saw on my fileserver, but that was 
probably because lp0 was "Not a valid file"!  Since the Tape Drive in 
question works through the Parallel Port, a I suspect that a failure in 
the Parallel port would cause the Drive not to work.

I will post more updates as I get the details.

Regards,
Steve