How can I control a tape library

[Lucien Wolfs]

Hi,

How can I control a tape library (barcode), like eg. move tapes ? We don't have something like Omniback (yet), but I want to use it anyway. A search on the forum didnot come up with anything useful.
On Tru64 there's mcutil (not supported, but provided).
Who can help me..


Thanks,

Lucien

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hello,

You can use the mc command within HP/UX. Do a man mc for a quick introduction to this command. You will soon learn its full capabilities.

HTH,
Vince

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Lucien,

you should be able to use the "mc" command to manipulate the library. You should have the changer/picker and the drives configured into the system. Your ioscan should show you the drives and the changer. for eg. your changer is /dev/rac/cxtydz and the drive is /dev/rmt/0m. Say it is a 10 slot library and there are two drives Drive 1 and drive 2.

to move a DLT from slot 4 to Drive 1

# mc -p /dev/rac/cxtydz -s S4 -d D1

to move the DLT back from drive 1 to slot 4

# mc -p /dev/rac/cxtydz -s D1 -d S4

To chekc the status of slot and Drives,

# mc -p /dev/rac/cxtydz -r DS

Once you have moved a DLT from one of the slots to the drive, you should be able to write and read from that DLT as you normally do with any other drive.

# tar cvf /dev/rmt/0m some_directory
# tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m

Here 0m is the device file for the drive you are using.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

mc will work but yoiu could use plan B. Go ahead and install Omniback. It will install with a 60 day trial license and by that time you should have decided whether or not to purchase the product. The library manipulation scripts are not difficult but if you are planning to implement OB2 it's quite a bit of duplicated effort.

[Deshpande Prashant]

HI
You can use the "mc" command to move tapes between slots.
But if you want to take large backups by manually moving tapes in slots, you will have to remember which tape is used & how much. So I suggest to use Omniback like software which will keep catalog of all backup sessions and media.

Thanks.
Prashant.

[Jason VanDerMark]

If you are using or plan to use Veritas' NetBackup software, they have a nice little tool called 'robtest' which allows you to manipulate your robotic tape array. You can load/unload tapes, move them from slot to drive and vice-versa. Hope this helps.

Regards,
Jason V.

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

What method of recording was done to gather
this information. If you are using sar -d
it will not give an accurate reading because
of the caching in the SAN.

-Michael

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

Yes use OmniBack.... but to do your
testing you will still need to set
up a robot control device, even for
using 'mc'. You set this up using the
attached document.

-Michael

[Michael Tully]

Looks like my copy and paste has a problem with my fingers..... Please ignore my first posting!

[Lucien Wolfs]

Thanks guys/girls,

This is realy why this forum is great. Look, at the number of possible helpers.

Thanks again !!!

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

If you have Omniback installed, you can use the uma command at the command line to manipulate the tape library picker:

# /opt/omni/lbin/uma -ioctl /dev/rac/cXtXdX

Some commands you can run within the uma shell:

1) Move tape from slot 2 to drive 1:

> move s2 d1

2) Check the status of slot 2:

> stat s2

With the uma, you can easily write a script to manipulate tapes in the tape library and check the status of the slots and drives (empty or full) etc.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com