Remote Access to Local Tape Drive

[Buckethead]

Hi.
I seem to recall, many moons ago, a software utility that allowed a local tape drive to be accessed by a remote node.
Example: i have an AlphaServer 4100 that has an TZ89 tape drive attached. I would like to make the TZ89 accessible to another cluster (non-clustered with the 4100)
For the life of me I cannot remember the name of the utility.
Any one?

[Jim_McKinney]

How about TCP/IP's RMT (remote mag tape) utility?

[Hoff]

There's a DCL hack in the FAQ that can do something like this, if this is end-to-end VMS and you have DECnet around.

OpenVMS FAQ:

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1

Restoration using this path is dicy, given the difference in the installation environment, but at least you'll have the data and can probably acquire a spare or can temporarily relocate the tape drive.

[Steven Schweda]

Look for "zt" in the freeware collection?

Personally, I'd look at Ebay for a used tape
drive.

[Buckethead]

We're running v5.4 - ECO 7 of ip on our AlphaServers and I believe the RMT utility first became available in v5.5?

Actually, after thinking about it a bit I think what I'm going to do is NFS serve/export the device I want to back up to the 4100 so it can do the tape backup from the export. The files are static (backup savesets) so I don't have to worry about any locking issues.

Thanks to all for the responses.

[Hoff]

Steve's got a very good point. This is junk-grade hardware, so scrounging a TZ89 is likely going to be the cheapest fix. I see one TZ89N (which is the density-restricted variant) for US$50, and DLT 7000 and DLT 8000 drives are cheap, too.

[GuentherF]

Archive/Backup System (ABS) for OpenVMS comes with a remote tape drive server (RDF).

Not sure on which OpenVMS versions or architectures it is still supported.

/Guenther

[P Muralidhar Kini]

Hi,

I think you are referring to RDF (Remote Device Facility).
This allows you to access the device on the remote node even if that remote node is not in a cluster with the local node.

The following link has some documentation on RDF -
http://www.ttinet.com/doc/rdf.html

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Murali

[Oswald Knoppers_1]

>We're running v5.4 - ECO 7 of ip on our AlphaServers and I believe the RMT utility first became available in v5.5?

No, it is in REXEC actually. I think it was introduced somewhere in UCX V4.1. Long time ago.

Oswald