Ultrium LTO and fbackup

[John J Read]

Easy 10 points. Last I tried, fbackup could not write to my LTO tape drives. Is this possible with a patch or some configuration change?

My primary backup method is Veritas Netbackup but I would like to use fbackup on occasion to these drives too.

Is anyone using fbackup/frecover to LTO Ultrium? ( not Ultrium 2 )

[John J Read]

Yes.. I know there are lots of posts on this topic but they all seem pretty old. I'm trying to get a definitive yes/no on whether it's worth it to try and implement fbackup with LTO.

-jr

[Kim Denton · Accepted solution]

My system configuration is a RP5470 running HP-UX 11.0. We have a MLS 5030 tape library using 2 LTO Ultrium drives.

I've been using fbackup to backup to the Ultrium drive without any problems. Just make sure the os can see your device files. To get the device file, you can ran an ioscan.

FYI: Our RP5470 was setup on March 21, 2003. At some point I will be using DataProtector to backup. Until then fbackup is the way to go.

[Steven E. Protter]

There is no problem with the LTO ultrium dirve and HP-UX fbackup.

I'm running rp5450(L2000) with external LTO drives.

ioscan -fnC tape

Does the tape drive show up on ioscan.

Of so, do the device drivers exist:

ll /dev/rmt/

If not, use sam to recreate the device drivers.

If you self installed the drive check the connectors and make sure they are flush.

run an ioscan | more and look for conflicts.

What is the SCSI address on the back of the drive. It should not conflict with any other devices on the ioscan.

SEP

[melvyn burnard]

do tar and cpio work wiht this device?
Is this an HP Ultrium drive?
if so, ensure you have the latest scsi and stape patches installed, also check your fbackup patching.
Without the stape patched, your drive may not be reporting back corectly to the fbackup device inquiry

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Is perhaps the drive locked by NetBackup.

[Vermeulen Peter]

we got it working with a seagate LTO drive (inside a storagetek L20 library). With tar and cpio there are no problems but with fbackup (even with all the latest patches) we need to 'fool' the machine and access the device as if it was a remote tape drive, by putting the hostname in front of the devicefile. So in our case the fbackup command is like this: fbackup -I /etc -f baantest:/dev/rmt/c8t0d0BEST

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

Hi,

Like melvyn burnard pointed and the others also you need a pathch for fbackup on Ultrium drives, check:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x0193afe90f1cd71190050090279cd0f9,00.html

[Frank Slootweg]

*Which* error message(s) do you get?

Please post a full failure scenario, including the command options (and content of any parameter files used) and full log.

[John J Read]

Ok, I see I've opened a small can of worms. I'll set up some new tests to use my LTO drives from various servers/OS versions, patch levels, etc. I am rather busy today but will post my results soon with the error messages.

thanks for all of your replies. I will dole out points when we get this answer finalized.

[John J Read]

Sorry to all forum members but this turned into a useless post. If there is an administrator, perhaps the whole thing can be removed.

I forgot to follow-up on this and now the problem is resolved. I have applied patches to the server since and my guess is that is what fixed it. To partially redeem myself, I'm giving everyone 10's.

I'll do better next time.