Remote Shell

[Rob Smith]

I think I did this once before but I cannot remember how I did it. Any help would be appreciated.

System A has a tape drive, system B does not. How can I back up system B onto the tape drive on System A? Is that something I can do via remsh? Many TIA's in advance.

Regards

[James A. Donovan]

I believe the fbackup command supports remotely mounted tape drives. Check the fbackup man page.

[Tom Danzig]

You can do something like:

tar cvfb - 20 | rsh dd of=/dev/rmt/0m obs=20b

Make sure .rhosts or hosts.equiv is set up for the user doing the backups.

[Volker Borowski]

Or
use SAM, after permitting access in .rhosts.
This is creating a remote fbackup.
Volker

[Jeffrey S. Sims]

fbackup supports backups over NFS mounts.

[Jason VanDerMark · Accepted solution]

Just another possibility...

You could remotely mount the drive for use:

On system A(server with drive):
mount /dev/rmt/0m /tape
exportfs -i /tape

On system B(without drive):
mkdir /dev/rmt/0m
mount xx.yy.zz:/tape /dev/rmt/0m

This would allow you to run any commands on system B that require a tape drive.

Remember that whenever you use exportfs and are finished using the drive you must umount things in a certain order.

umount /dev/rmt/0m on system B
run 'exportfs -uav' on system A
then umount /tape on system A

Haven't tried this, but in theory it should work. :-) If this won't work, please let me know.

Good Luck,
Jason V.

[Bill Hassell]

NFS is a not very fast on a network at all. Also, you must giveaway root privileges to the machine with the tape drive as the backup program must be able to read every file regardless of permission or ownership.

The remsh/dd/cpio combinations are better but there is nothing in these connections to ensure the data has been transmitted correctly. And restoring files/directories is going to be tricky.

fbackup is designed for network backups and only requires remsh capability.

As with any network backup solution, be very sure you have a plan on how to restore the entire computer, a replacement of the root disk or restoring a few files. And test it.