[MiNT] Strange Bug

[Mark Duckworth <mduckworth@atari-source.com>]

Hey guys,

I'm going to attempt to track down a strange bug over the next few
days.  Now that I know my system is 100% solid and my ethernet also
tests well the results should be interesting.

What happens is, I create a backup script to backup partitions C through
H using tar.  The destination is a mounted nfs share.  The nfs appears
to work fine and tests well for small tests (100MB or so), but for
higher amounts of data there are errors introduced both early and later
in the archive.  This is with or without gzip compression.  Seems it
could be a bug in tar or mintlib as many times it says "obsolescent base
64 headers found, skipping to next" and continues there until the end of
the file.  As the files are gzipped, if it was an nfs failure at all
causing complete corruption, the first thing to go would be gzip, but
that is not the case. 

The data sizes I am working with are several thousand files at 500MB-1G
of total data per archive.  I've attempted using gzip compression with
tar zcvpf and plain tar archive, both come out bad.

The smaller drives, like drive c with only a few 100MB of data test
okay, so it's definitely a problem that takes a lot of stress to arise -
definitely it could be my st-ram board not liking 20MHz or something so
I MUST replicate this with aranym before it can be considered a bug. 
But as well, I thought I would post early to start a discussion to see
if others experienced similar issues.

Thanks,
Mark
http://portal.atari-source.com