How to rotate tapes in 6 tape autochanger?

[Jon Jenkins_1]

We have a HP 6 Tape autochanger attached to our L2000 server running 11.0, great for backups as it automatically switches to the next tape when needed. How can I get it to pick a tape from a different slot without having to pop down to the server room and press the next tape button?

Thanks

[Helen French · Accepted solution]

Hi Jon,

Which OS ? Which backup software ?

If you are using Omniback, Legato, Veritas etc, then the GUI will have options for eject, mount operations; provided you have configured the autochanger properly.

If you are using normal backups and wish to to these operations, then use 'mc' command. See man pages of mc for details.

Check this document too:

http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=0b9afd9012feb9fb5a/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000047120327

HTH,
Shiju

[Jon Jenkins_1]

Many thanks Shiju, mc was the answer I needed. We use fbackup on HPUX 11.0.

[Bill Hassell]

The mc command is the secret, but the man pages make it difficult to understand. You might want to pickup a copy of loadmedia (and autosum too) from:

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

Put loadmedia in /usr/contrib/bin, set the environment variable LIBRARY=/dev/rmt/robot_arm and now you can simply type:

loadmedia 4

It handles all the tasks including putting an existing tape away into the first empty slot.