A recent message or two about remote dumps prompted me to polish up
some tools I wrote some time ago, in the belief that they might be useful
to others.
A couple of years ago, in response to a number of problems with rdump,
I wrote a couple of simple front-end programs that provide remote tape
access to arbitrary programs. The general idea is that you run
wrrmt remote:/dev/nrmt0h dump 0f -
to run `dump 0f -' with `remote:/dev/nrmt0h' attached to the standard
output; or
rdrmt remote:/dev/nrmt0h restore if -
to run `restore if -' with `remote:/dev/nrmt0h' on its standard input.
The programs use the rmt protocol, so tape errors will be detected and
reported. They also take care that the eventual exit status will be
nonzero if a tape or network error happens, or the local command using
the tape exits with nonzero status. (This is one class of troubles
with some versions of rdump, and with `dump 0f - | rsh remote dd'.)
The programs also allow an arbitrary remote userid to be specified
(e.g. user_at_remote:device), and give the actual local userid to the
remote for authentication checks, rather than the compiled-in values
of `root' and `root' in some versions of rdump. They also allow the
pathname of the remote tape program to be specified, making them a
little less painful to use when the tape drive machine has /usr/sbin/rmt
instead of /etc/rmt.
You can get the programs by anonymous ftp from
ftp://ftp.hprc.utoronto.ca/pub/remtp/remtp.bun
Comments and suggestions and whatnot are welcome.
Norman Wilson
High Performance Research Computing
University of Toronto
norman_at_hprc.utoronto.ca
Received on Tue Sep 05 1995 - 18:24:06 NZST