How to send tapes from DLT 6/60 to mail slots by OmniBack

[Tan-Phu Lu_1]

Hi all,
I have a DLT 6/60 and I use OmniBack 3.0(3.5 soon) to backup oracle databases on HPUX 11.0 server.
I want to know how to send tapes to the mail slots once the backup is finish (in this way we can pickup the tapes and send them outside the site)and how to send back the new tapes from mail slots to available slots on the DLT 6/60.
Any idea? Thx.

[Angus Crome]

You need to check out the man pages for the
following commands;

/usr/sbin/mc - generic
/opt/omni/lbin/uma - specific to Omniback
/opt/omni/bin/omnimm "
/opt/omni/bin/omnidb "
/opt/omni/bin/omnirpt "

The mc command does not update the omniback database, so I generally only use it for moving stuck tapes.
The general syntax for mc is;
mc -p -s -d

The types for source and dest are
M - Not very useful
I - Mail Slot
D - Drive
S - Slot

uma is another story, it has a lot of switches associated with it.

Generally, you script out your offsite cycling,
using uma commands. Mine is a very modified
hack from our local HP office integrators, which no longer resembles the original except in function names. It requires use of information from various omniback reports and commands to function and is definitely not perfect (equates to Always under construction).

You should be able to use the Edit/Eject command from your library GUI in xomni to eject tapes to your mailslot/exit-port as well.

Disclaimer; I don't have any direct experience with setting up and using the E-Tape libraries.

[Joseph T. Wyckoff]

One big gotcha - each of these commands needs slightly different information.

MC - tell it about the TAPE DRIVE special file
i.e /dev/rmt/0m

UMA - tell it about the ROBOT special file
i.e. /dev/robot
or /dev/rac/c5t3d0

use STAT to see status
use MOVE to move tapes

if a tape gets stuck in a drive, use MT
mt -t /dev/rmt/0m OFFL to allow eject/move

OMNIMM - tell it about the OMNIBACK NAME for the tape media or the library
...you want -eject here, I think.

Good Luck.

[MARREEL Chris_1]

I dont know which user-interface you use, I allways use the NT-user-interface, even when my OmniBack Cell Manager runs on UNIX.
In the NT-Interface you can right-click on a slot and you can select EJECT.
This operation moves the tape from the slot to a mail-slot.
The other way (from Mail-slot) to Slot in the Tape-library : use ENTER.

I don't know how to automate this, but I use it manualy until now.

Greetings,
Chris MARREEL

[Sandro Schaer_1]

somewhere in omniback you can define post-exec scripts. simply write a executable shell script containing a "mc -p -s -d ". now include this script as post-exec in your backup-specs. be aware that this action is not recorded in your omniback database !

have fun
sandro

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

You can't use a post-exec script as
the tape is still active in the session.
You will need to run a script afterwards
that does this. We do a similar thing
except we only run the eject program
once a day. This of course depends on
how many backups you run a day. This
should solve your problem too Chris.
This script will only work for tape
libraries that have barcodes. No
warranty is offered.

There is a couple of things to note:
omnimm -eject "Your tape library name"
/dev/robot (your picker name)
ME0 (Replace with your string of barcode
numbering. All of my tapes start with this.)
Daily= String I use to differentiate between
different types of backups.
HTH
-Michael