On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 10:42:40PM -0400, Chris Hoogendyk wrote: > When you say Mac OS X doesn't support tape drives, do you mean that the > specific type of implementation expected by amanda is not supported? I'm kind > of blindly waving my arms in > the air, but it just doesn't seem quite right as a blanket statement and > leads me to question further. Could you humor me and explain in more detail? > And what does that mean for > BSDs in general?
Well, I base that opinion on findings around the web such as this: http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2005/Jun/msg00081.html http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-drivers/2003/Apr/msg00068.html And the fact that my Mac systems don't, in fact, have 'mt' or 'mtx'. I recall reading a much more authoritative source, but of course Google is not finding it for me now. In detail, the story is that there are no device drivers (and thus no /dev/ entries) or tape-related utilities (mt, etc.) on a Mac. Macs do have SCSI subsystems, and it's possible to attach most SCSI tape drives to a Mac. As you mention, Retrospect includes built-in drivers for various tape drives. It would probably be possible to write a Mac driver for a specific tape drive or even family of drives (and the messages linked above suggest folks have done so), but Amanda has been getting *away* from device-specific support for a long time, and I think that's served the project as a whole well. The Device API will, of course, make this kind of project a lot easier. My apologies for my own hand-waviness at throwing that information out there in my original email with no supporting evidence! As for BSDs in general -- Apple has basically *removed* support that's available in the base BSD systems, so no worries. Dustin -- Dustin J. Mitchell Storage Software Engineer, Zmanda, Inc. http://www.zmanda.com/