Exporting Tape devices to other system

[Forex]

Hi, I want to do an informix ontape backup on a system that does not have a tape device. Is it possible to export a tape device from another system to perform this backup. Thanks.

[Steven E. Protter]

Not in HP-UX.

You can copy the tape contents to an exported filesystem but tape drives can't be shared.

Bill Hassell says so. I think.

I've seen it from enough senior HP folks to be pretty confident.

SEP

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Forex,

The best way is to export the back to a filesystem onto your local system and then use "fbackup" to backup it up onto the remote tape.

-Sri

[Rajeev Shukla]

Hi,
Change the TAPE parameter in the onconfig and take the ontape on a file in a filesystem. The file thus created can be copied to the tape on another system using fbackup -f remotehost:/tapedevice ...
or use GNU tar or a combination of tar and dd

cheers
Rajeev

[Bill Hassell]

A tape drive is a serial device and unlike a filesystem, cannot be exported. fbackup can be used to write to a remote tape device BUT:

1. The remote system must allow remsh access from root to root, and

2. the tape will not have highspeed recovery markers recorded onto the tape (which makes frecover much, much slower for small restore operations).

I would look at HiComp's HiBack backup program as a good solution to sharing a tape drive over a network. Other alternatives are: HP's Omniback, Veritas backup, Legato Networker, and others.

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

enable remsh in /etc/inetd.conf and you can use fbackup

#fbackup -f :/dev/rmt/0c /

You can't export a tape drive since it is a serial device