Other LTO tape and PowerVault/StorageWorks Autoloaders

[FrankL]

Before I re-invent something that I simply don't know about, is anyone else using LTO tape on FreeBSD, especially with HP StorageWorks or Dell PowerVault juke boxes?

With a single drive you can get away with mt and tar/dump as you prefer. It's also easy enough to dump a ZFS dataset to a tape device - although not documented (that's one of my first jobs). But when it comes to jukeboxes there's nothing I'm aware of - you can't even get at the tape label - either via the RMI or cam. Unless you know different?

I haven't even been able to find programming documentation from HP or Dell, but some must exist as commercial backup products can do this on Windoze.

Is there some huge cache of documentation I'm missing (pointer please!), or is anyone else working on this and able to join forces?

BTW, I am aware of LTFS but it's not really useful in the BSD world, where archiving databases and datasets is more likely to be of interest.

Thanks, Frank.

 

[Jose]

It looks like the way to manage medium changers in Freebsd is the chio(1) command. I also know that there's at least one person that successfully uses Bacula with a medium changer in Freebsd

Adding a tape library to Bacula – Dan Langille's Other Diary

 

[FrankL]

Thanks Jose - that could be the missing link I couldn't find! If you check the documentation it's not mentioned anywhere (okay, now I know what to look for I found it in a FAQ for FreeBSD 2.2!) At the very least it needs to go in the "See Also" section of the mt man page. I've been looking at the Handbook and thought the documentation on using tape needed a serious update, so I'm on my way again.

However, having had a quick look it requires the ch driver, and that doesn't appear to have been updated for over twenty years. I suspect it's not going to work with anything like a modern tape library so I'll try and contact the authors for more information.

 

[Jose]

Thanks Jose - that could be the missing link I couldn't find! If you check the documentation it's not mentioned anywhere (okay, now I know what to look for I found it in a FAQ for FreeBSD 2.2!) At the very least it needs to go in the "See Also" section of the mt man page. I've been looking at the Handbook and thought the documentation on using tape needed a serious update, so I'm on my way again.

However, having had a quick look it requires the ch driver, and that doesn't appear to have been updated for over twenty years. I suspect it's not going to work with anything like a modern tape library so I'll try and contact the authors for more information.

You're welcome!

Give it a shot. The SCSI spec for medium changers probably hasn't changed in 20 years. I'm betting it will work.