Copying From A Tape

[Suren Selva]

Hello All,

We have a server with no tape drive. We also have an application in a 4mm tape that has to be sw-installed in this server.

I mounted the tape in the drive of another system and executed dd to copy the files with the hope of trasnferring the files to the original server to do the swinstall.

I tried the following command:
dd if=/dev/rmt/0m of=/var/somefile.

It did not copy all the files. How can I move the files from tape onto this tape drive-less system for swinstall?

Thanks in advance to all replies.

Regards,
Suren

[Ted Ellis_2]

how is the data stored on the tape? with tar?

if it is tar... try using this rsh command to move the contents of the tape over to your target server... the one you want this installed on. Once copied, just do the normal swinstall per whatever procedure you have.

you need to have the .rhosts settings to allow rsh between servers

on the server where you want to install software:

rsh "dd if=/dev/rmt/0m obs=20" | tar -xvBf -

make sure you are sitting in the directory where you want this copied before running the command above

Ted

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi Suren,

Another thing to be aware of is the when a product is swpackaged to tape, it's assumed that the install will ONLY be done locally.
If you do extract it to the system with the tape drive & wish to swinstall it from the remote system, you'll need to do a couple things:

1) In the catalog directory do
touch swlock
chmod 444 swlock

2) swreg -l depot /path/to/package
to register that dir as a depot to be accessed from a remote system.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

Hi,

The real problem is to know how your tape has been built. If it was a swpackage, it should work with a dd (perhaps add an option bs=10k). In this case swinstall should work directly using this dd file transfered on the drive-less system even without registering the depot.

But what do you mean by 'It did not copy all the files' ? If you have several distinct files on the tape, you will have to use a no-rewind device, (0mn) but in this case it can't be a single sw depot.

Regards.

[Suren Selva]

Thanks for all your suggestions. The tape came with a SW depot. I copied the tape contents to another server using swcopy and registered the depot using swreg.

Now I tried an swinstall -p over the network from the remote server. It worked!!

Regards,
Suren