remote tape drive and frecover

[Gordon Brown_5]

It's frecover day today !

I have 56 odd Gb to restore so I thought I would use an idle drive on another server.

Issuing th ecommand frecover -x -v -N -f /dev/rmt/0m on the host machine provides a listing of the tape contents.

If I issue the command
frecover -x -v -N -f cliff:/dev/rmt/0m -i p1 -i p2 on the remote host I get the error message:
frecover(2115) i/o error
frecover (1065) read error on file header.
if I just ask to list the tape
frecover -x -v -N -f cliff:/dev/rmt/0m does give a listing.

IS it possible to do a selective restore from a remote machine ?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Gordon:

Your tape may be bad. Try cleaning the drive. What you are attempting should work.

Regards!

...JRF...

[melvyn burnard]

Yes you should be able to that quite happily.
Have you tried to use the -i options on hte local machine?

[Bill Hassell]

Try the header and then the index (table of contents) commands remotely first:

frecover -V - -f cliff:/dev/rmt/0m

frecover -I - -f cliff/dev/rmt/0m

The -N command is massively slow since it reads the entire tape whereas -I reads the central index at the fron of the tape. This index is what makes fbackup/frecover so much faster and more useful. Note: to get remote tape drives to work, remsh must work on the local machine over to the remote machine as in:

remsh cliff pwd

It should not ask for a password but simply report the $HOME directory of the user on the remote machine. .rhosts controls this access.

[Frank Slootweg]

As JRF indicates, you probably have a bad tape or/and drive.

I am not quite sure, but the fbackup manual page seems to imply that fast search works for remote DLT drives (it does not for remote DDS drives). If so, then the first command (with the "-i" options) will do a fast search while the second will not. For a shakey drive, that might explain the difference.

[Steven E. Protter]

run a dmesg and look for SCSI errors that track back to the tape drive. Do it on the remote machine of course.


I agree with the bad tape drive theory, except to point out the problem could be cabling, termination or another bad device on this or another SCSI chain. I've seen some weirdness where a bad drive on one chain causes me to lose access to devices on a different chain.

Of course my box is old and decrepid and I'm suspposed to be working on replacing it.

Doh.

Get back to work Steve

P

[Gordon Brown_5]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all your comments.

I can read th etape locally with -i -e and it does restore so th etape is okay.

remsh is set up between the two hosts and works fine.

Listing the tape from the remote works fine , what doesn't work are the -i -e options.

Reading the manual page entries says DDS doesn't support fast search. I think what it should say is that remote -i -e isn'r supported.

G