sharing a tape drive ..is it possible...???

[dhanish]

Hi,
Can i share a tape drive to be accessed by another HP UX machine .

[Stefan Farrelly]

It depends on which commands you want to work with it. fbackup supports an option to write to a remote tape drive on another server (as long as root can login without a password) - see manpage on fbackup.

If you want to use tar then you can use it in association with remsh so that you can access a remote tape drive from your current server (again, as long as you can login to the remote server without needing a password).

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hello,

It depends what you want to do. Omniback provides that flexibility on a high-scale. If you want a lower scale tape sharing, fbackup or tar together with some command tweaking does the trick for you.

HTH,
Vince

[kish_1]

some usefull links. http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x2a94e7e60861d511abcd0090277a778c,00.html

[BFA6]

Hi,

I have two machines which I backup using fbackup to the tape drive on one of the machines. So it is possible.
The backup using the remote tape drive does take about 4 times longer.

Regards,

Hilary

[steven Burgess_2]

Hi

example backup command

fbackup -v -f :/dev/rmt/0m -i

HTH

Steve

[Nick Wickens]

Although this is possible its not always desireable for large backups as any backups to a remote systems tape unit will be constrained by network speed. The examples quoted using fbackup & tar have been used here for smaller backups and we do let Omniback do this type task on occasion. However it may be worth ensuring that your two servers are connected using the best network speed you can achieve and if possible are connected on the same switch.

The other alternative, if both machines are equiped with Fibre via a fibre switch is to look at putting the tape drive on the fibre switch using something like the Crossroads unit which I believe HP now supply. This will then let both machines access the tape unit at fibre speeds.

[John Bolene]

For ignite purposes, we sneakernet share a tape drive. This only works if you have physical access to all machines in a timely fashion.

All the newer machines have their own tape drive for this purpose, but all the older ones we move the tape drive when we need to do the ignite deal.

The machines are backed up with ignite about once a month or whenever patches are done. We use ignite to capture the system areas so that if a disk drive dies, the machine can be recreated fairly quickly.

All of the user data is in vg01 and backups are done with Omniback to a central Omniback tape drive server.