Re: LTO drives
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Nick Brockner [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Howdy, Time to replace the aging DAT changer. Just looking for some input on what LTO3/4 drives (or libraries) work well with amanda. Thanks in advance, Nick For a relatively buget offering in the changer arena we have used a ADIC Scalar 24 (now Quantum) with LVD scsi LTO-2 drive for about 4 years. The tape drive just failed so I'm the process of getting a replacement, but the changer has worked nicely with Amanda up till now :) cost new about $12k.
Re: disk-disk-tape best practices
My experience with amanda in the past is that it will not write level 0 dumps only to holding space - is this incorrect? If this is the case then indeed my configuration is overly complicated. I have in the past maintained a 9 months backup history - that would be about 270 tapes - a lot of LTO2 media. I didn't mention but we are an academic environment so this starts to become cost prohibitive, as it is I was looking at only providing a semester ~ 3month backup window going forward. On 3/1/07, Paul Bijnens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-02-28 21:09, Alastair Neil wrote: I have a question regarding how best to manage backups to vtapes and archival onto tape media. First a little history, I used to have a DLT4 9 tape changer and have been running my backups through this for about 3 years now. This changer failed and for a number of reasons was not under support. Fortunately I had a scalar 24 LTO2 changer I can use. However our nightly backups were running around 40-60 Gbytes so unless I could append to tapes this would waste a lot of media. The solution I would like to implement is a series of vtapes each about 30Gbytes and a script to check how much had been used and initiate an archival dump to the LTO2 media if it is in the vicinity of 200Gbytes. So this brings me to my few questions In order to prevent older tapes being overwritten before being stored to tape is it best to basically never reuse a tape and have the script erase and relabel the slots after the archival dump is made? I would need two amanda configurations to manage this kind of configuration. This lead me to worry about recovery - how do I locate the correct archival tape to find the correct tapes for the daily dumps? I have read through the File driver page on the wiki.zamanda.org http://wiki.zamanda.org, but I did not see any specific information about these questions. Am I being dense? My main requirement for a backup system is that the restore procedure should not be too dificult. Ever had a system crash, and working hard to restore stuff, while the phone rings with angry users? Anything making it more complicated than necessary is to be avoided! My first impression for such a setup is that you're making the restore much more difficult. What you have on tape is a series of amanda-vtapes. Restoring then consists of first locating the physical tapes, which contain the correct vtapes, restoring those to some temporary location, and then extracting the files themselves from those vtapes. The restoring to a temporary location also makes it impossible to use the normal amanda tools on these restored vtapes. Note that the indexes amanda generates for the physical tape, consist only of the filenames of the vtape-implementation. By erasing and relabeling the vtape slots, you also erased those indexes. Getting a consistent set of vtape-indexes + vtape-contents stored, plus making those usuable for a normal restore with amrecover is not trivial. If you believe your disk is reliable enough to hold many days of backup data, why don't you just declare it as a large holdingdisk. Just run Amanda daily, and let the backup images collect on the holdingdisk. When enough backups have been collected, insert a tape and run amflush, or just let it flush to tape during the nightly amdump run (with autoflush true in the amanda.conf file). This procedure lets you use the full possibilities from amanda, including restore with indexes from holdingdisk or tape, and let amanda worry which tape or holdingdisk image contains which files. One more contemplation: is your backup data really that worthless that you cannot afford 5 LTO-tapes extra, so that you can still backup daily to tape? Just calculate the cost when you do loose the backups of the last 3 days, because you tried to economize in the wrong place. Don't try to economize in the wrong place. Look at it this way: because you don't have to spend a fortune on a commercial backup solution plus some small fortune on yearly support and upgrade, you can now invest some more money in physical tapes, and still do it cheaper and better. -- Paul Bijnens, xplanation Technology ServicesTel +32 16 397.511 Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUMFax +32 16 397.512 http://www.xplanation.com/ email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** * I think I've got the hang of it now: exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, ^^, * * F6, quit, ZZ, :q, :q!, M-Z, ^X^C, logoff, logout, close, bye, /bye, * * stop, end, F3, ~., ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt, abort, hangup, * * PF4, F20, ^X^X, :D::D, KJOB, F14-f-e, F8-e, kill -1 $$, shutdown, * * init 0, kill -9 1, Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Del, AltGr-NumLock, Stop-A, ... * * ... Are you sure? ... YES ... Phew ... I'm out * ***
Re: disk-disk-tape best practices
On 3/1/07, Matt Hyclak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 12:53:43PM -0500, Alastair Neil enlightened us: My experience with amanda in the past is that it will not write level 0 dumps only to holding space - is this incorrect? If this is the case then indeed my configuration is overly complicated. I have in the past maintained a 9 months backup history - that would be about 270 tapes - a lot of LTO2 media. I didn't mention but we are an academic environment so this starts to become cost prohibitive, as it is I was looking at only providing a semester ~ 3month backup window going forward. It most certainly does store level 0's to holding disk. I also am educational and have an LTO2 setup. My weekly backups are currently about 150GB, so I let them spool on a RAID1 holding disk for a week, then put a tape in and let them autoflush on the 7th day. I have a rotating set of tapes for 20 weeks, and do an archival dump quarterly. You probably just need to adjust your reserve parameter properly in amanda.conf. The default is 100% is reserved for degraded-mode backups. Set it to something smaller to allow fulls to fit. Matt Thanks for the pointer, I will try this. I assume I turn off autoflush? I'm going to try with a reserve of 25% - I have a 250 Gbyte holding disk.
disk-disk-tape best practices
I have a question regarding how best to manage backups to vtapes and archival onto tape media. First a little history, I used to have a DLT4 9 tape changer and have been running my backups through this for about 3 years now. This changer failed and for a number of reasons was not under support. Fortunately I had a scalar 24 LTO2 changer I can use. However our nightly backups were running around 40-60 Gbytes so unless I could append to tapes this would waste a lot of media. The solution I would like to implement is a series of vtapes each about 30Gbytes and a script to check how much had been used and initiate an archival dump to the LTO2 media if it is in the vicinity of 200Gbytes. So this brings me to my few questions In order to prevent older tapes being overwritten before being stored to tape is it best to basically never reuse a tape and have the script erase and relabel the slots after the archival dump is made? I would need two amanda configurations to manage this kind of configuration. This lead me to worry about recovery - how do I locate the correct archival tape to find the correct tapes for the daily dumps? I have read through the File driver page on the wiki.zamanda.org, but I did not see any specific information about these questions. Am I being dense? TIA Alastair
Re: amanda mini-howto
One important step wrt to amanda on solaris 7 (and 9 for that matter) is that the sun shipped tar is broken, you will need to compile gnu tar 1.13.25 or higher to make tar based backups work. - Original Message - From: Leandro [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:39:44 -0300 Subject: amanda mini-howto To: amanda [EMAIL PROTECTED] i´m newbie in amanda. i compile ok in solaris 7. Can anybody tell me if there is a mini-howto or newbie-friendly-pdf about usage of amanda ? Thanks. Leandro. Argentina.
corrupt tar backup
I am having a problem with one of our clients backups , restoring the files generates tar errors and fails. There are several disklist entries using tar on this client all seem to exhibit this problem. We are running Amanda 2.4.4p2 with gnu tar 1.13.25. The server is running solaris 9 and the client solaris 8. I built the amanda and tar myself from the same sources on all our machines. There have been no warnings during dumps that I was aware of. Any suggestions gratefully received. Here is sample output from a restore: sextant:/holding2 mt rew; amrestore /dev/rmt/0hn megalon mail amrestore: 0: skipping start of tape: date 20040804 label ITE-NONFULL-030 amrestore: 1: skipping compass.var.20040803.2 amrestore: 2: skipping kitty.root.20040803.4 amrestore: 3: skipping sextant.root.20040803.2 amrestore: 4: skipping compass.root.20040803.1 amrestore: 5: skipping compass.usr.20040803.1 amrestore: 6: skipping kitty.export.20040803.4 amrestore: 7: skipping chrono.root.20040803.1 amrestore: 8: skipping chrono.student-ab.20040803.1 amrestore: 9: skipping chrono.facstaff.20040803.2 amrestore: 10: skipping chrono.student-n.20040803.1 amrestore: 11: skipping chrono.student-kl.20040803.1 amrestore: 12: skipping chrono.student-ij.20040803.1 amrestore: 13: skipping chrono.usr.20040803.1 amrestore: 14: skipping chrono.student-tu.20040803.1 amrestore: 15: skipping chrono.student-cd.20040803.1 amrestore: 16: skipping chrono.student-ef.20040803.1 amrestore: 17: skipping chrono.student-vw.20040803.1 amrestore: 18: skipping chrono.student-m.20040803.1 amrestore: 19: skipping chrono.student-xyz.20040803.1 amrestore: 20: skipping chrono.student-opq.20040803.1 amrestore: 21: skipping chrono.student-gh.20040803.1 amrestore: 22: skipping chrono.var.20040803.1 amrestore: 23: skipping chrono.student-rs.20040803.1 amrestore: 24: skipping compass.opt.20040803.1 amrestore: 25: restoring megalon.mail.20040804.0 amrestore: 26: skipping megalon.student.20040804.0 amrestore: 27: skipping megalon.faculty.20040804.0 amrestore: 28: skipping megalon.graduate.20040804.0 amrestore: 29: skipping megalon.root.20040804.0 amrestore: 30: reached end of tape: date 20040804 sextant:/holding2 tar tvf megalon.mail.20040804.0 drwxrwxrwt root/mail 1903 2004-08-04 16:08:12 ./ drwxrwxr-x root/mail 1 2004-08-03 10:13:57 ./:saved/ drwxrwx--- root/mail 187 1998-10-09 15:27:33 ./TT_DB/ drw-rw root/mail 1 1998-07-02 11:46:02 ./lost+found/ -rw-rw slingya/mail504 1998-12-03 14:19:47 ./.aarora_dt_index -rw--- aynur/mail 8160 2004-08-04 16:08:12 ./.aynur_dt_index -rw-rw adm/mail 6874 2003-04-03 08:37:05 ./adm -rw-rw 4099/mail372504 2003-08-14 14:46:40 ./cfarkas tar: Skipping to next header tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers -rw-rw jli/mail536 2001-09-12 16:28:34 ./jli -rw-rw vsriniv1/mail 61697 2000-10-23 09:47:30 ./joxan -rw-rw yluo/mail 29306 2004-07-09 15:04:00 ./yluo tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors sextant:/holding2 ls -al megalon.mail.20040804.0 -rw-r- 1 amanda sys 5744640 Sep 22 00:07 megalon.mail.20040804.0 sextant:/holding2
preprocessor and disklist
A quick question. My disklist is getting pretty long, is there any preprocessor support so I could have entries like: #include disklist-1 begin:vcard fn:Alastair Neil n:Neil;Alastair org:George Mason University;ITE Labs adr:;;ST2, 4400 University Drive;Fairfax;Virginia;220030;USA email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Unix Systems Engineer tel;work:703 993-3953 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.ite.gmu.edu version:2.1 end:vcard
Re: Problems dumping from Solaris
what version of gnutar are you running if it is 1.13 you need to get the 1.13.25 gnu tar sources and build that jlm17 wrote: Hello, I have an amanda backup server running on a Sun Ultra 2 with the Gentoo Linux OS. I initially set this up to backup two Windows PCs, and it works great. Now I need to expand it's job and backup some Solaris boxes, particularly one that is running SunOS 5.6. I believe I have configured everything correctly. amcheck returns just fine. I have compiled a version of Amanda for Solaris and placed it in an NFS exported filesystem that the client to be backed up can see. When I do amdump cc501 on the Ultra 2 it takes about 15 minutes and then returns this: FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY: cc501 /export/h4 lev 0 FAILED [Estimate timeout from cc501] NOTES: planner: Adding new disk cc501:/export/h4. driver: WARNING: got empty schedule from planner DUMP SUMMARY: DUMPER STATSTAPER STATS HOSTNAME DISKL ORIG-KB OUT-KB COMP% MMM:SS KB/s MMM:SS KB/s -- - cc501/export/h4 0 FAILED --- The log file on the server shows nothing. There is no log file on the client. I did notice this though: ps -ef | grep amanda amanda 2702 149 0 15:02:27 ?0:00 amandad amanda 2709 2702 0 0:00 defunct jlm17 2721 1615 0 15:02:41 pts/20:00 grep amanda amanda 2710 2708 0 15:02:27 ?0:00 /sontools/local/amanda/libexec/sendsize amanda 2708 2702 0 15:02:27 ?0:00 /sontools/local/amanda/libexec/sendsize jlm17 2724 1615 0 15:02:42 pts/20:00 grep amanda Notice that defunct that is started by amandad. Does anyone know what amandad starts up between the two execs of sendsize? I tried to have a some sort of script wait for amandad to start up and then truss (Solaris version of strace) its output, but it never got to the process in time and it always just returned sleeping. Not sure what to do to get this going since I have no output to give me an idea why it is failing. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. begin:vcard fn:Alastair Neil n:Neil;Alastair org:George Mason University;ITE Labs adr:;;ST2, 4400 University Drive;Fairfax;Virginia;220030;USA email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Unix Systems Engineer tel;work:703 993-3953 x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.ite.gmu.edu version:2.1 end:vcard
Re: Solaris 8 and L200
I don't have an L200 I have an L9 and I'm running Solaris 9, but I
assume the setup will be pretty much the same. I use mtx-1.3.8, I don't
recall where I downloaded it from however a google search should pick it
up easely. You must make sure the sgen driver is configured in your
kernel so check /kernel/drv/sgen.conf, this should give you an entry in
/dev/scsi/changer, mine is:
c3t0d0 - ../../../devices/[EMAIL PROTECTED],4000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],1/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0:changer
A search of the archives turned up a number of scripts which purport to
work with amanda and mtx, I picked the one that seemed to have been
modified most recently: mtx-changer. I have attached my copy with my
configuration.
I amanda.conf I have the following:
tpchanger mtx-changer # the tape-changer glue script
tapedev /dev/rmt/0hn # the no-rewind tape device to be used
rawtapedev /dev/null # the raw device to be used (ftape only)
changerfile
changerdev /dev/scsi/changer/c3t0d0
the mtx-changer script itself resides in /usr/local/libexec.
hope this helps.
rgds Alastair
Christoph Scheeder wrote:
Hi,
first: please keep this task on the list, it gives other people the
posibility to jump in and correct me if i tell you something wrong
I guess this is a scsi-tapechanger, correct? then you have a few
possibilities to get the robot moving:
chg-scsi, mtx, and possibly more, i don't know all the free available
tools to make tape robots move, espacialy for solaris as i am using
linux on all my servers and i opperate my tapechanger all with chg-scsi.
so now we are at the point where one of the solaris-people here on the
list should jump in to help you further, but the need a little more info
on your problem likthe exact type of your changer, which version of
amanda you use, if you compiled it your self etc.
Christoph
Glenn Zenker schrieb:
Thanks, that is a big help! I'll switch to another script and see
what happens.
Do you know if Amanda can move the robot?? Currently, the only
software we have works through a webpage.
Thanks,
Glenn
Christoph Scheeder wrote:
Hi,
You have configured amanda to use chg-multi as changer script.
i don't think this is what you want. chg-multi is used with
multiple tapedrives to form a virtual tape-robot.
use one of the other chg-scripts, depending on which software
you use to move your robot.
Christoph
Glenn Zenker schrieb:
I have amanda installed when I run the following command as the
user amanda
/usr/local/sbin/amverify DailySet1 0
I get this:
Tapes:
Errors found:
amtape: could not load slot 1: chg-multi: slot is empty
amverify DailySet1
Thu Mar 4 13:18:52 EST 2004
Loading 1 slot...
** Error loading slot 1
amtape: could not load slot 1: chg-multi: slot is empty
If anyone can lend a hand with how they configured their L200, that
would be greatly appreciated.
#! /bin/sh
###
# AMANDA Tape Changer script for use with the MTX tape changer program
# Version 1.1 - Wed Mar 7 16:50:05 CST 2001
#
# Based on 'stc-changer' by Eric Berggren ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
# Updated by Tim Skirvin ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
#
# Given that there's no license...let's make this the Perl Artistic License.
# Just make sure you give me and Eric credit if you modify this.
###
### USER CONFIGURATION
# Name of the tape drive (takes place of tapedev option in amanda.conf)
# and default driver number in library (usu 0) that DRIVE_NAME points to
DRIVE_NAME=/dev/rmt/0hn # /dev/rmt/0n ?
DRIVE_NUM=0
# Location of STC command and control device
MTX_CMD=/usr/local/sbin/mtx;
MTX_CONTROL=/dev/scsi/changer/c3t0d0;
# Whether tape drive must eject tape before changer retrieves
# (ie, EXB-2x0). Usually okay if set while not necessary, bad if
# required but not set.
DRIVE_MUST_EJECT=1
# How long to check drive readiness (in seconds) after mounting (or
# ejecting) a volume (on some libraries, the motion or eject command may
# complete before the drive has the volume fully mounted and online,
# or ready for retrieval, resulting in Drive not ready/Media not
# ready errors). Do an mt status command every 5 seconds upto this
# time.
DRIVE_READY_TIME_MAX=60
# tape mt command location...
MT_CMD=/usr/bin/mt # called via MT_CMD -f DRIVE_NAME rewind
# MT_CMD -f DRIVE_NAME offline to eject
# and MT_CMD -f DRIVE_NAME status to get ready info
##
#
NumDrives=-1
NumSlots=-1
LastSlot=-1
LoadedTape=-1
#
# Usage information
#
usage()
{
echo
echo Usage: $Progname command [arg...]
echo -info reports capability and loaded tape
echo -slot slot loads specified tape into drive
echo current reports current mounted tape
echo next loads logically next tape (loops to
disk list entry format
Is there any provision in the DLE format to include pre and post run scripts e.g. to shutdown a database prior to backup? I did not find anything relevant in the FAQ-O-matic. -- Dr. Alastair J. Neil ITE Laboritory George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 22030 (703) 993-3953
amtapetype
I just ran amtypetype -f /dev/rmt/0bn, a Sun Storedge L9 autochanger
and recieved the following:
define tapetype unknown-tapetype {
comment just produced by tapetype prog (hardware compression on)
length 34169 mbytes
filemark 28 kbytes
speed 1787 kps
}
I'm confused because I believed this to be a DLT8000 drive which should
be closer to 80 MBytes compressed, and certainly the speed is not what I
expected either. I ran amtypetape -c -f /dev/rmt/0bn and amtypetape -c
-f /dev/rmt/0cbn and received nearly identical output:
amtapetype -c -f /dev/rmt/0cbn
Writing 256 Mbyte compresseable data: 27 sec
Writing 256 Mbyte uncompresseable data: 56 sec
WARNING: Tape drive has hardware compression enabled
Estimated time to write 2 * 1024 Mbyte: 448 sec = 0 h 7 min
amtapetype -c -f /dev/rmt/0bn
Writing 256 Mbyte compresseable data: 25 sec
Writing 256 Mbyte uncompresseable data: 56 sec
WARNING: Tape drive has hardware compression enabled
Estimated time to write 2 * 1024 Mbyte: 448 sec = 0 h 7 min
Host is a Sun E250, with HVDS adaptor.
Does anyone have experience with this drive?
--
Alastair Neil
Unix Systems Administrator
ITE Labs
George Mason University
(703) 993-3953
mtx and storedge L9 on solaris 7 server
can someone give me some pointers about accessing my juke box using mtx? I cannot figure out what device to use. nwadmin reports the control port at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and the tape device as /dev/rmt/1hbn , this is a link to : /devices/[EMAIL PROTECTED],2000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],1/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0:hbn any pointers appreciated. -- Alastair J. Neil Unix Systems Administrator ITE Labs, George Mason University
Re: mtx and storedge L9 on solaris 7 server
On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 13:24, Jon LaBadie wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 12:15:26PM -0500, Alastair Neil wrote: can someone give me some pointers about accessing my juke box using mtx? I cannot figure out what device to use. nwadmin reports the control port at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and the tape device as /dev/rmt/1hbn , this is a link to : /devices/[EMAIL PROTECTED],2000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],1/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0:hbn any pointers appreciated. Do you have any entries under /dev/changers or /dev/scsi/*? no /dev/scsi directory nor /dev/changers Using the Solaris sgen driver (scsi general) others have reported that they get devices /dev/changer/???. I get something under /dev/scsi/sequential/???. From that I manually create a /dev/changer/??? link because it makes sense. Check the archives or your vendors docs for comments about setting up /kernel/drv/sgen.conf if you haven't already done so. You say your tapedevice is /dev/rmt/1. What is /dev/rmt/0? Do you have another tape drive? If not, maybe you should remove all the symbolic links in /dev/rmt and run devfsadm(1m) to recreate them. If both reappear, then perhaps one is the tape drive and the other is the changer device. I get both the /dev/scsi device from the sgen driver and an extra /dev/rmt device from the st driver. The latter is also my changer, I can use either. /dev/rmt/0 is the built in DAT drive, I'm confident that I have the right tape device. It looks like sgen is not configured so I have created a sgen.conf file and then I'll schedule a reboot -- -rv to see if the devices files you mentioned are created. Thanks for your help I think you have set me on the right track. regards, Alastair -- Dr. Alastair J. Neil Unix Systems Administrator ITE Labs, George Mason University
