Maybe you know that with GNU tar on UNIX it's possible to do remote backup in both directions: archive a remote disk to a local tape, or a local disk to a remote tape. But the UNIX networking in itself is not able to access remote devices: the /dev directory is not accessible in remote. So, somebody wrote a program called "rmt" which may be launched in a remote shell and performs operations on the local tape on behalf of a remote workstation.
Suntar now supports that protocol.
What to do
You must have a Macintosh networked to a UNIX workstation with a tape unit. MacTCP must be installed correctly. You must have an account on that UNIX machine, because you must enter your username and password, and you must have access rights on the tape device.
Then things are quite easy: launch suntar on your Mac, in the "Open device" menu item select "remote UNIX tape" , fill the dialog which appears (all fields except the password are remembered, so you need enter them only once), and then use all the commands in the menus (Rewind, List, Extract, New tar archive… that should be easy enough).
Just in case, you may configure the port number of rexec (used to launch a program remotely, it's standard as 512 but in special cases your system administrator may have changed it) and the pathname of rmt: they are both accessible through "rarely used options", in Expert mode.
Beware !
The support of remote tapes is beta. Really, we are not sure that "skip filemark" works correctly so you should verify that you are in the correct archive before extracting ("Error/status info" prints the information, since it's kept on the UNIX side it's guaranteed to be correct).
We've tested these things last year, before Open Transport. But there should be no problem in using MacTCP emulation under Open Transport.
And, worst of all, it was tested when we still compiled with Think C. In theory, having passed to another compiler shouldn't have changed anything, but practice is never the same as theory. If it doesn't work on a PowerMac, you may try to strip the PowerPC code and use the 68K code in emulation. Anyway, the readme files contains our E-mail address: please report of any problem which does not seem due to an incorrect configuration (if you can't Telnet with those same parameters, it's useless to complain with us).
