Optical Library/Jukebox Control under HPUX 11

[Bill Larson_2]

I have inherented an HP Optical Library and want to use it on an HP-UX 11
system. Searching through the HP web site, I have found extremely little
information about how to install/use this hardware.

I want to know what utilities are available to control the library/jukebox
itself under HP-UX 11.0. There is a "mc", Media Changer, command available,
but the man page only seems to mention this in relation to tape libraries.
Will this also work on a optical library also?

I am NOT willing to part with the $10K for a commercial package (AMASS by
ADIC), but would prefer to use the utilities available under HP-UX. Other free
software would be acceptable, if anyone knows of something useful.

Thanks

[Juan González]

Prueba

[Jan Klier]

HP-UX has a built-in driver for optical libraries. It is not loaded by default, and you have to change your kernel configuration to include the schgr and ssrfc driver modules [depending on your HBA you may need autox0 instead of schgr].

Once the system boots with the new kernel, it will create a special device file for each surface in the unit, which can be accessed just like a regular disk, with the limitation that at any given point only as many surfaces can be accessed as you have drives.

The device special files are located in /dev/ac for the block devices and /dev/rac for the raw devices.

The typical use model is to use newfs to put HFS or VxFS filesystems on the optical disks, and then use mount and umount to access cartridges as needed.

This is a reasonable low-end solution but does not provide many of the benefits of 3rd party solutions, and has limited performance due to the nature of the HFS and VxFS filesystems on MO devices.

[Tom Gore]

One thing I found was "uma". I has (in my opinion) a fairly good man page.