Sharing tape drives

[Mark Cook]

I have an L2000 which only has a CD-Rom drive, however, I have a patch bundle that I need to install which is on a tape. I also have a D380 which does have a tape drive. My question is, how can I share a tape drive between two different servers?

[Wieslaw Krajewski · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I understood that you have a patch depot on the tape
Depot on the tape can be used only locally, no remotely as for example depot on the disk or CD.
So try to use swcopy to copy the bundle from your tape to a place on disk.
Then you can use swinstall on the server to be patched and load th apatch from the depot created by swcopy command.

[melvyn burnard]

On the D-class, do a swcopy to /var/spool/sw

Then on the L-class do swinstall -s :/var/spool/sw

HTH

[Mark Cook]

Thank you for your quick reply. I do have the release notes that explain the procedure that you mentioned, I was just curious how to share a tape drive with another machine. More then likely, I will do the swcopy then swinstall. Thanks again and have a wonderful day!!!!
Mark

[melvyn burnard]

Mark, just in case you read this :-]
Sharing a tape drive is not supported unless using facilities such as the ATS in ServiceGuard, or via a SAN.
In both cases you are talking robotics via Fibre Channel. I would guess the tape you have is a DDS, internal to the Dclass? If so, no real easy answer, other than to purchase a stand alone unit and have a scsi interface in each system deciated for that drive that you can then power off, disconnect from one system, connect to the next, power on again and do an ioscan -H to see if it can be used.
HTH

[Mark Cook]

Melvyn,
That makes sense! We are running a san, but I think I was under the assumption that a former associate was able to "share" a tape drive using SAM. At any rate, thank you again for all your time and effort!
Mark