Dear OSF colleagues:
I want to thank all who responded to my inquiry (copy below) regarding
remote tape drive access. There were many differenct solutions. They
can be placed into about three categories:
(1) obtain (likely purchase) special purpose software which exploits
this feature
(2) mount remote (to tape drive) machine as NFS mount and copy data to
tape on local machine (contains tape drive)
(3) set up the remote machine as trusted to root and allow access to
tape drive remotely
To the best of my knowledge and also since no response came from this
group otherwise, there is no built-in feature/software to exploit
remote access to a tape drive. I did not choose #1 above because I
wanted an inexpensive solution. I did not choose #2 above because I
wanted to run the backup from the remote machine to the local tape and
not use my Alpha box to run backups. Further, from experience, I know
NFS network transfer is slower than a more direct route.
It turned out that #3 is a fairly simple solution if one has a
trusted machine. Create a .rhosts file in the root area of the
DEC-Unix machine which contains the tape drive of the form:
trusted.machine.name.address root
where trusted.machine.name.address is the name of the computer which
contains the data to backup. Then, from the trusted machine issue the
gnu-tar command:
tar cvfX root_at_dec_unix:/dev/rmt0h exclude_files / 2>back_all.err | tee back_all.list
where dec_unix is the name of the dec_unix machine which contains the
tape drive, and exclude_files is file which contains directories not
to copy (/proc, /dev, etc.). This backs up my entire file system, the
network transfer is more than enough to keep the tape drive buffer
full, does not take too long to execute, and can be set up to run at
off hours. But, if the data cannot fit on a single tape, one will
either have to add the "M" to make "cvfXM" and feed tapes manually in
the day time, or design the file system dump to fit on a single tape.
I hope this helps other similar request and I thank this newsgroup
again for the help.
P.S. AMANDA is free and could also be a better solution. However, it
is much more complicated to setup than this , and I don't have the
time right now.
original request:
__________________________________________________________________
I have a DEC-Alpha machine running DEC-Unix OSF1 v 4.0. This
machine includes a scsi tape drive as /dev/rmt0h. I would like
to allow other unix machines to write to this tape for backup
purposes. I cannot find an easy mechanism on the system management
tools set to do this. How can I do this?
Received on Fri Nov 07 1997 - 04:18:23 NZDT