topic Tape drive sharing in Operating System - Linux

Tape drive sharing

Daniel Fourie — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 02:29:42 GMT

I would like to share a DLT tape drive on my linux 8.0 machine with a windows machine.

Please help

Re: Tape drive sharing

Mark Grant — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 03:21:25 GMT

I don't think you can BUT you can back up your windows machine from your linux machine.

Just use smb or NFS to mount what you need from one machine on the other machine and back it up from there.

Re: Tape drive sharing

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 17:53:53 GMT

The only software I am aware of that will let you share tape drives between machines is:

Veritas media manager 4.5

I'm sure other products exist, but its the only one I'm aware of.

The license fee exceeds the cost of the hardware in this instance.

SEP

Re: Tape drive sharing

Martin P.J. Zinser — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 19:01:23 GMT

Hello Matrix,

there are actually two problems to solve in such a case if you do want to access the tape from both systems.

First both systems need to have physical access to the drive. This might be as simple as SCSI Y-cables or more sophisticated like a Fibrechannel fabric.

Second you need to make sure that access to the tape only happens by one system at a time, else you will end up with garbage on the tape. This is where the software comes into play. For pure backup purposes software like Legato will do this but does require you to have their servers and clients installed.

Conclusion: If you do want real shared access you do need to invest money.
If you can attach the drive firmly to one system and mount the file system of the other one remotely this is one possible solution. And finally there is the low low tech solution if you need to switch infrequently: Unplug the cable from server A and move it to server B and vice versa as needed.

Re: Tape drive sharing

Olivier Drouin — Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:12:57 GMT

Maybe you can use NFS ?

say, on machine "kenny" you `dump` /FS_TO_BACKUP.

on machine "cartman" you want to backup /usr/local.

Just mount /FS_TO_BACKUP on cartman. You tar /usr/local on /FS_TO_BACKUP.

Start the tape and dump /FS_TO_BACKUP on it.