[Gllug] Why won't tar access a remote device?

[Nix]

On Sun, 12 Mar 2006, John Winters announced authoritatively:
> I use tar on the machine with the files, accessing the tape drive by
> means of tar's inbuilt remote device access, piggy-backed onto ssh.  The
> thing is - I can't see what it is that tar thinks is failing.  The
> following is a (very short) strace of what tar does and I can't see why
> it thinks things have gone wrong.  It doesn't even seem to think about
> trying to access the remote machine - it just says, "Won't".  Can anyone
> see why?

I concur.

Unfortunately without knowing what the command line was, debugging by
looking at the source is very difficult, but I'd guess that an errno
initialization and syscall was skipped for some reason, and then tar
checked that errno was zero, leading to, well, nonsense.

I recommend compiling tar with debugging and breakpointing on strerror()
and __strerror_r() inside libc. :)

-- 
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 unplanned downtime, you should add in padding for random management
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