Accessing external tape drive remotely

[jaminas]

Hi Everybody!

I have an external tape drive that is conneted to of the servers. The main Tape library is faulty and would like to use this tape drive as backup medium. Two other servers are having oracle 9i databases on them and would like to take usual backup.

I configured the tape drive as a NFS file system and shared it to the network.

Share -F nfs -o rw niima-s-05:niima-s-08 -d "dlt_tape_drive" /dev/rmt/0mn

/etc/init.d/nfs.server start

shareall

On the remote system, niima-s-06:

mount niima-s-05:/dev/rmt/0mn /ITUdump_Tape

The problem here is the command to backup from the local system(server niima-s-05 & niima-s-08)

tar cvf /ITUdump_Tape dumped_files

it shows ok but does'nt get to the tape drive.

What is missing?

thanks

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

You miss nothing.

The OS does not provide the ability to share tape drives like disks. NFS will be of no help in this situation.

Options:
share nfs on local machine and use rsh/ssh to jump on remote machine, mount the share and use the drive.

Serviceguard appears to have tape sharing devices.

Veritas Netbackup and other programs do permit remote use of tape devices and makes sure they are properly locked.

SEP

[Pete Randall]

You don't need NFS. Try this:

tar cvf niima-s-05:/dev/rmt/0mn dumped_files


Pete

[dattu_1]

Hi Peter,
But when i tried in my test server i was able to rlogin into remote system but tar is not accessible....But fbackup does.

[Ralph Grothe]

Pete's suggestion should also work with the various dump and restore utilies.
On Solaris for instance it's the common disaster recovery method if neither have a lingering jumpstart server, nor local tape drive.
But as a prerequisite you usually are required to create an .rhost file in root's home on the machine with the attached tape drive that contains the IP address of the dumping (or restoring) host.
I know this works with ufsdump, so I assume the same will be true for vxdump.

# vxdump 0f remote_host:/dev/rmt/0mn /some/local/fs

It should equally well work by writing or reading streams to/from (raw) devices (probably to be preferred)

# vxdump 0f remote_host:/dev/rmt/0mn /dev/vgXX/rlv_with_vxfs

or restore

# cd /some/local/mount2restore && vxrestore rvf remote_host:/dev/rmt/0mn

According to man vxdump there's even a remote dump version called rvxdump,
but never have tried it.

The dump/restore pairs are nice tools if you need to backup and restore whole filesystems efficiently without having to bother for large or special files.