All,

My company has a system that uses as its' base OS Solaris 10 X86.  Right 
now we are only writing CD-Rs but plan to move up to DVD-R.

To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.

We make backups by using our own GUI to select the files and 
directories.  That GUI builds the CLI command to run the burn.  We do 
not display any progress or status info other than a pass/fail message. 
  The routine has been known to report success and actually produce a 
bad tar file that does not restore correctly.

Compounding the problem on our system is the fact that we have sizable 
amounts of code for the user interface and also for machine control 
running in Java.  When the system is running, we have 4 JVMs running for 
differing parts of the system.  This leads me to wonder if we are just 
asking too much of a 2.0 Ghz AMD 64 with a GB of RAM.  I wonder if we 
may be running out of data for the drive to write (buffer under-runs)

What is the point of all this?  I am really looking to see if there are 
other folks out there having problems writing CDs under Solaris.

Please respond to the group and also to: rstoos@rochester.rr.com

Thanks to all,


Ralph

On Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:37:39 GMT,
"Ralph H. Stoos Jr." <rstoos@rochester.rr.com> wrote:
> My company has a system that uses as its' base OS Solaris 10
> X86.  Right now we are only writing CD-Rs but plan to move up
> to DVD-R.
>
> To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There
> are several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That
> should not be too hard to solve, but I believe we might also
> have other issues.

Any particular messages from the program(s) used to write the ISO
images to the CD-ROM disks that you can show us?

> We make backups by using our own GUI to select the files and
> directories.  That GUI builds the CLI command to run the burn.
> We do not display any progress or status info other than a
> pass/fail message. The routine has been known to report success
> and actually produce a bad tar file that does not restore
> correctly.

I've been using Solaris tar(1) and cpio(1) for backing up data
for a long time now.  No bad tarballs here.  Are you sure the GUI
program doesn't generate commands that fail to correctly backup
your data (i.e. because of spaces in the filenames)?

> Compounding the problem on our system is the fact that we have
> sizable amounts of code for the user interface and also for
> machine control running in Java.  When the system is running,
> we have 4 JVMs running for differing parts of the system.  This
> leads me to wonder if we are just asking too much of a 2.0 Ghz
> AMD 64 with a GB of RAM.  I wonder if we may be running out of
> data for the drive to write (buffer under-runs)

This shouldn't be a serious problem.  I've been running tests on
an AMD64 system with 2 GB of RAM.  The tests some times require
about a dozen or so of zones, each one running one or more
instances of the JVM, without serious 'responsiveness' problems.

In article <nMlwf.92100$ME5.52065@twister.nyroc.rr.com>,
	"Ralph H. Stoos Jr." <rstoos@rochester.rr.com> writes:
> All,
> 
> My company has a system that uses as its' base OS Solaris 10 X86.  Right 
> now we are only writing CD-Rs but plan to move up to DVD-R.
> 
> To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
> several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
> too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.

Make sure you have DMA enabled...

eeprom atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1  (and reboot)

Without that, my identically spec'ed system only creates DVD coasters.

-- 
Andrew Gabriel

Ralph H. Stoos Jr. wrote:
> To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
> several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
> too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.

Try turning off the volfs service.

In article <43C2A2E9.5030208@tel.fer.hr>,
Josip Gracin  <gracin@tel.fer.hr> wrote:
>Ralph H. Stoos Jr. wrote:
>> To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
>> several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
>> too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.
>
>Try turning off the volfs service.


Media compatibility is unrelated to volfs.

-- 
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J�rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
      js@cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  
      schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de	(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

In article <43c249c2$0$87294$5a6aecb4@news.aaisp.net.uk>,
Andrew Gabriel <andrew@cucumber.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>> My company has a system that uses as its' base OS Solaris 10 X86.  Right 
>> now we are only writing CD-Rs but plan to move up to DVD-R.
>> 
>> To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
>> several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
>> too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.
>
>Make sure you have DMA enabled...
>
>eeprom atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1  (and reboot)
>
>Without that, my identically spec'ed system only creates DVD coasters.

Good point!

As this has become the default on Solaris 11, I tend to forget about it.

-- 
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J�rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
      js@cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  
      schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de	(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

Ralph H. Stoos Jr. wrote:
> All,
> 
> My company has a system that uses as its' base OS Solaris 10 X86.  Right 
> now we are only writing CD-Rs but plan to move up to DVD-R.
> 
> To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
> several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
> too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.
> 
> We make backups by using our own GUI to select the files and 
> directories.  That GUI builds the CLI command to run the burn.  We do 
> not display any progress or status info other than a pass/fail message. 
>  The routine has been known to report success and actually produce a bad 
> tar file that does not restore correctly.
> 
> Compounding the problem on our system is the fact that we have sizable 
> amounts of code for the user interface and also for machine control 
> running in Java.  When the system is running, we have 4 JVMs running for 
> differing parts of the system.  This leads me to wonder if we are just 
> asking too much of a 2.0 Ghz AMD 64 with a GB of RAM.  I wonder if we 
> may be running out of data for the drive to write (buffer under-runs)
> 

2.0GHz should be OK, I can burn CD-R and DVD-R on a Sun Blade 100 with 
no problems (DVD x4 speed) and do other things, a 2GHz machine has far 
more computational grunt.

Careful selection of your drive is the key to successful writes. I 
currently use a Pioneer DVD writer because cdrecord supports this device 
well, including the burnfree option. I would agree that some media does 
cause problems, however once you have sorted out the good media from the 
bad you should not experience problems with the writer.

Would suggest a good drive which supports burnfree with cdrecord and 
some decent media, then you should sorted.

John.

Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Josip Gracin  <gracin@tel.fer.hr> wrote:
>>Ralph H. Stoos Jr. wrote:
>>
>>>To date we are having only marginal success writing CDs. There are 
>>>several reasons and one is CD-R media compatibility.  That should not be 
>>>too hard to solve, but I believe we might also have other issues.
>>
>>Try turning off the volfs service.
 >
> Media compatibility is unrelated to volfs.

Maybe I didn't understand correctly, but I was refering to the potential 
"other issues", and I think volfs has been the cause of many badly 
burned CDs.  If I've misunderstood the OP, feel free to ignore me.

In article <dpvup0$5c3$1@sunce.iskon.hr>,
Josip Gracin  <gracin@tel.fer.hr> wrote:

>>>Try turning off the volfs service.
> >
>> Media compatibility is unrelated to volfs.
>
>Maybe I didn't understand correctly, but I was refering to the potential 
>"other issues", and I think volfs has been the cause of many badly 
>burned CDs.  If I've misunderstood the OP, feel free to ignore me.


So far, I did not hear from a single verified case where volfs did cause
problems when burning CDs.

-- 
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J�rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
      js@cs.tu-berlin.de		(uni)  
      schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de	(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily