Unattended backup tape advance how-to?

[ANTHONY BARNES_1]

Greetings,

I am looking for a way to auto advance the tape in my HP C6366A during a SAM initiated backup under HPUX 11.0. The C6366A is a 6-slot DAT drive library and I would like to find a way to auto advance the tape when it becomes full during a full backup. Is there any facility to do this from within SAM or can I script this with 'fbackup' myself? I have configured and been using the 'mc' command to auto advance the tape in between my SAM backups for the last year or so. Now my volume groups have gotten a bit larger.

I currently have a few fairly large logical volume groups. Might a better solution be to split them up into smaller groups?

Any direction or advice is welcome.

Thanks for your time.

[Alex Glennie · Accepted solution]

found the following which looks applicable ?

Example chgvol script for fbackup to control tape libraries
DocId:
KBAN00000401

Updated:
20000706


DOCUMENT

Below is an example chgvol script to enable the unattended use of tape
libraries and autoloaders with fbackup(1M). It is unsupported, but has
worked fine for many customers. It assumes the device file for the robotics
is at /dev/picker. This maybe changed in the script.

Save this script in the file /var/adm/fbackupfiles/chgvol, and make it
executable. You will need to make sure that one of the switches on the
fbackup command line is -y. If you are using sam to
schedule the backups then it is recommended to do the following to add the -
y:

1) cp /usr/sam/lbin/br_backup /usr/sam/lbin/br_backup.change
2) Change the cron job to call the modified br_backup.change
3) Edit the br_backup.change in the following two lines

FULL) backup_type="-0" to
FULL) backup_type="-0 -y"
and
PART) backup_type="-1" to
PART) backup_type="-1 -y"


Also you will need to use the -c option with fbackup, and specify
a configuration file(/var/adm/fbackupfiles/fbackup_config is a good
place for this file). Sam does this automatically. You will just need
to edit the existing file.

In this configuration file you should specify the following:

blocksperrecord 128
records 32
checkpointfreq 256
readerprocesses 2
maxretries 5
retrylimit 5000000
maxvoluses 100
chgvol /var/adm/fbackupfiles/chgvol
filesperfsm 200




#!/usr/bin/sh
####################
# chgvol for autoloaders
# Revision 1.0
# Date: 12/21/99
# Author: James Kirkland / jtk@atl.hp.com
# Purpose: To allow fbackup to work with autoloaders
# NOTE! This script is not supported by HP. It is provided as an example only!!
####################

# Setting up variables

TMPDIR=/var/tmp
RTDIR=/var/adm/chgvol
SES_FILE=$RTDIR/session
NUM=$TMPDIR/chg_num.tmp
PICKER=/dev/picker # device file for the robotic arm

#scripting

get_current_pid(){
NOW_PID=`ps -ef |grep fbackup |grep -v grep | cut -c 10-16`
return 0
}


is_sess_old (){
S_PID=`tail -1 $SES_FILE`
get_current_pid
if [ $NOW_PID -eq $S_PID ]
then
echo "Continuing with current session from fbackup PID $S_PID"
else
echo "This is the first tape change for fbackup PID $NOW_PID"
echo $NOW_PID > $SES_FILE
init_num
fi
return 0
}

init_num() {
echo "1" > $NUM
return 0
}

if [ -a $SES_FILE ]
then
is_sess_old
else
touch $SES_FILE
is_sess_old
fi
if [ -a $NUM ]
then
S_NUM=`cat $NUM`
else
init_num
S_NUM=`cat $NUM`
fi
S_NUM_OLD=$S_NUM
let S_NUM=S_NUM_OLD+1
if [ $S_NUM_OLD -gt 0 ]
then
echo "Moving tape from Drive 1 to Slot $S_NUM_OLD ."
mc -p $PICKER -s D1 -d S$S_NUM_OLD
#err code needed
echo "Moving tape from Slot $S_NUM to Drive 1 ."
mc -p $PICKER -s S$S_NUM -d D1
#err code needed
echo $S_NUM > $NUM
logger -t chgvol -p local0.info "Changing tape. Pulling from Slot
$S_NUM"
fi
exit 0