>Hi all, new to the group! :-)
Welcome!
>I have a 400GIG RAID array on an Sun E3500 and a new Exabyte 110L tape
>library to back it up.
OK.
>Also, the 110L has scsi mode and sequential mode, not sure which one would
>be best.
I'm not sure what "sequential" mode is, but given the choice, I'd go
with "SCSI". I suspect sequential means when you eject a tape the
changer automatically switches to the "next" one (like a gravity
stacker), while "SCSI" will probably give you random access.
>I've been looking into Amanda and mtx, but am a little confused ...
You and a lot of other people :-).
Changers can be a real challenge to set up. And the documentation
is difficult to provide because there are so many variations between
hardware and OS.
>both are compiled and installed.
What version of Amanda? What version of mtx?
>I haven't done anything with any scsi conf files, ie, st.conf,
>sgen.conf,etc. I can edit these files if necessary, but being on a
>production system,
>reboots are very rate. My guess is I need to?
You may or may not need to update st.conf. I'd look at the documentation
that came with the changer and see if they either tell you what to put in
st.conf, or lead you to other documentation specific to the drive itself.
I looked around both the ExaByte and IBM web pages but didn't really
find anything conclusive.
To talk to the changer you'll need to have a generic SCSI device
driver. Prior to Solaris 8 that meant sst (in contrib/sst with Amanda).
With 8, you can (and probably should) use the Sun sgen driver. See the
README.Amanda document, which in turn refers you to sgen(7D) for changes
you have to make.
You may or may not be able to do all this without rebooting. In theory
you only need to use modunload and modload. But I've crashed systems
more than once doing that.
The first thing to do before messing with Amanda is to get the hardware
working. Start with the tape drive. Either get st.conf set up as above
or it might be that the defaults are good enough. Do some tar's and
ufsdumps and see how it behaves.
Next, try mtx. Start with "mtx inquiry". Once that's working, move on
to "mtx status" and finally "load/unload" and so on.
At this point you'll pick an Amanda changer script. Amanda runs "glue"
between itself and either some other program (e.g. mtx) or the low level
SCSI driver. If you go with mtx, I recommend getting the chg-mtx that
comes with Amanda 2.4.2p2 (actually, I'd strongly recommend 2.4.2p2 in
any case) -- it's recently been updated for current versions of mtx and
has the best support.
If you go with chg-scsi, you should build Amanda from the 2.4.2p2 CVS
sources (there are instructions in the FAQ -- get the "amanda-242"
branch). The latest chg-scsi has just been incorporated and is pretty
much the only one supported (the one in the released 2.4.2p2 tarball is
old, for instance).
Next, look at the comments in the beginning of chg-mtx or at the sample
chg-scsi config file in example/chg-scsi-solaris.conf. Build your own
changer config file from that starting point and put it someplace, then
point amanda.conf at it with "changerfile".
You'll also need to set changerdev to whatever device you pointed mtx
at earlier. The tape device name will go in the changer config file.
Now you can play with amtape. Start with "reset". Then try loading
specific slots ("slot 0", "slot next"). Keep an eye on /tmp/amanda.
The changers (and most Amanda programs) all keep debug files there of
what's going on.
Once you get to this point, you're 90% done. You just need to decide
what label string to use (e.g. "Daily-NNN") and set up amanda.conf, then
run amlabel (with "slot NN") on each tape, then start trying amcheck
and amdump.
> Tapetypes, not sure what to put there?
I'd just take something close and fudge the length value. I don't know
if the FAQ (www.amanda.org) lists your device yet or not. If you want
to spend the time (hours at least, maybe a day), you can cd to tape-src
and "make tapetype" then run that **on a scratch tape**. It will report
a measured tapetype entry to stdout.
If (when :-) you bang into more "issue" getting this set up, don't
hesitate to post here. This list tries to be very good at helping out
new Amanda users.
>Don
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
