Data Tapes

[Christian Aguilar Varga]

Hi,
I have a Server K380 (UNIX HP-UX 10.20) with a internal data tape module. There is a application running over it, and the information is saved in the data tape.
How Can I know the used capacity of the data tape from Operating System?

Thank you!!

[Rodney Hills]

I assume the tape unit is a DDS. Their is a handy utility called "tapeinfo" that can tell you a lot about the drive and the amount of data transfered to a tape.

I have attached the "shar" package with it.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Steven E. Protter]

How do I properly download and use this utility? When I click, I see a lot of binary code.

SEP

[Rodney Hills]

The attachment is a text file, which can be copied to your hp-ux 11 system.

To put "tapeinfo" into the current directory, just enter "sh thetextfile" on the text file fetched.

I believe tapeinfo is availabe from HP also. Try using SEARCH on the ITRC forum.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Looks like it's shell archive. The best way to attach winzip zipped files. All others, except pictures and text files, are not operable within ITRC.
In our case you can save contents of explorer window to the file, and then execute
sh
and it will extract this utility from its uuencode contents
Eugeny

[Rodney Hills]

If you want the ftp site of HP for this UNSUPPORTED tool. It is-

ftp://contrib:9unsupp8@hprc.external.hp.com/sysadmin/programs/tapeinfo/

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I would think that a much better solution to your problem is to have your application write to a named pipe (FIFO) and then have a process which reads this named pipe and write to the tape drive AND also updates a statistics file.

[Rodney Hills]

Clay,

Interesting thought about using pipes to total bytes. However, tapeinfo can tell you how much compressed data is sent to the tape. That way you would have a better indicator on how much of the physical tape is used.

-- Rod Hills