Sharing tape drive on other server

[Ahmed M. AlShafiy]

we have to HP servers with HP-Unix OS and each one have his own tape drive.
we want to make share between them so i can access tape drive on server y from server x to make backup.
please can any one help me.

[RAC_1]

Whay you want to share them for? for backups?? for restoring data??

fbackup can use drive on other nodes.
Else, you will have to manage with remsh scripts.

[Sivakumar TS]

Dear Ahmed,

What is the backup software that you use ?

Sharring of the tape drives is very much possible with VERITAS Backup software .

With Regards,

Siva.

[Ahmed M. AlShafiy]

i wnat to use it for backup and we are doning backup from SAM.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Ahmed,

HP-UX does not provide a facility in the OS to share tape drives between machines.

We get around that here by having portable tape drives that we move around.

Veritas netbackup does have a facility that lets other netbackup licensed boxes share tape drives. Its a very pricey option.

SEP

[Ahmed M. AlShafiy]

how???

in SAM backup i find backup in remote divices.

[RAC_1]

SAM won't do that. fbackup/frecover with command options will.
Simple tar would do it as follows.

cd /relative_path

tar cvf - . | remsh name -l user "cat - | dd of=/dev/rmt/0m bs=10k"

Restore a `tar' tape from a remote computer that owns a DAT/DDS drive.

cd /relative_path

remsh name -l user dd if=/dev/rmt/0m bs=10k | tar xvf -

[Ahmed M. AlShafiy]

how i can use the remsh?

coz when i write this:

# remsh xyz
rcmd: xyz: Unknown host

[RAC_1]

To use r commands, you need to have certain setup. In .rhosts file (residing in home dir of a user), you need to have username and host of host that you want to execute r commands on.

man rhosts for details.

[OldSchool]

In SAM areas -> Backup and Recovery. Under either "Automated" or "Interactive" there is an "Actions" item. This allows you to specify a remote device. When this is selected, it will prompt for "machine name" and "device name". Point these at the server and device you want to use.

Man pages for fbackup and frecover state that they will use the program "rmt" to assist in writing data on the remote device.

NOTE: I've never tried this, so I cannot state that it will work as advertised.

My question would be, why do you want to access a remote device? A "local" backup using a "local" device is potentially faster and wouldn't require network bandwidth to run.