sharing a tape drive

[Dee_3]

Is there a way to share a tape drive between two networked HP 9000 Unix boxes - like an L and an A? I can do this with the CD drive but is it also possible with a DAT drive?

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

See http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xe6ae53921f1ad5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Don't do it on a hardware level.. ie by sharing the bus.

You can do it via s/w.

See this post:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xa184dfe5920fd5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html


Later,
Bill

[Dee_3]

Thanks for the quick responses! In one of the postings prior someone indicated they were able to NFS mount the DAT drive but did not say how - anyone know? I have tried it in the same manner that I do a CDROM drive but it does not seem to work...what am I missing?

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I believe they'd do it by using the mt command to mount the tape, then nfs export that as normal....
It'd be nice to know if it works!

Later,
Bill

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

Dee, the tape not have a file system,the cdrom have CDFS,not is possible the NFS mount of the tape.

[Mark Mitchell]

Rem. to have it exported on the system1
then on system 2 enter
mount sys1:/dev/rmt/0m /tape

If you are having trouble then look into
rcpinfo and nfsstat man pages to trouble shoot.

[Carsten Krege]

There is a hardware setup that allows to share tape devices. This is used by the Advanced Tape Services (ATS) of Serviceguard, but can also setup and used in non-HA environments (you need the h/w setup used by ATS, latest stape patches, latest patches for the st(1m), mt(1m) and mc(1m)) to do this.

Check out the ATS manual for the h/w setup needed:
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/B3936-90032.pdf

Note: The FC SCSI MUX is required as this adds the functionality of SCSI RESERVE and SCSI RELEASE commands. Not all tapes are supported for device sharing, but for example

DLT 4000
DLT 7000
StorageTek SD-3 (Redwood)
StorageTek 9490 (Timberline)

Also most of the bigger HP tape libs are supported.

Carsten

[Dee_3]

Ok Mark - I have it mounted now how do I access it - like pull something off of or back up to a tape in that drive?

[Mark Mitchell]

Pulling off or writting to depends on what you are using. You just point it to the mount point. Such as cpio to tape it would look like this
#find /home -print|cpio -ocdumvB > /tape
then to get it off of tape
#cpio -icdumvB "/home" < /tape
Thats the nice thing about it being a mount point, you can use the same command as if you were to cpio a file to another disk drive