general

[Varghese Mathew]

Hi Everyone,

Is there any way around to control the access/usage of tar or fbackup or cpio or dd (backup utilities) for a tape drive. I want to give write access to only two groups say root and oracle administrators, so that no one else can overwrite the tape. At present what is happening is, one user inserts one tape in the drive and one other just overwrites the same - accidently.

Thanx in advance.
Cheers !!!
Mathew

[Robin Wakefield · Accepted solution]

Matthew,

You should be able to chmod the device files for the drive in question so that only certain members of a particular group can write to it.

Add them to, say, a "backup" group. If your tape drive is /dev/rmt/1m

chgrp backup /dev/rmt/1m*
chmod 664 /dev/rmt/1m*

don't forget there are some other obscure device files associate with some drives, depending on how they've been set up - do an ioscan to get them all.

Robin.

[Magdi KAMAL]

Hi Mathew,

I consider the tape drive /dev/rmt/0m for example. The file protection on that file is 666. and owned by bin and group is bin also.

You may :
1. Change the permission on that drive to 664 so that the "Other group" can only read the content of tapes but can't write ( since no write for others ).
2. Add the "bin group" to root and oracle users.

[Shahul]

Hi

Change the permission of /dev/rmt/0m as per ur requirement. This will solve ur problem



Shahul

[Rodney Hills]

Do a "man st". This is the "shared tape" command. It is designed to help manage a shared tape device amongst many users.