There are two places where you tell the drive what to do, its web interface and the terminal on the machine it's connected to. Keep in mind that the tape drive uses a SCSI interface to connect to a computer, so only machines with some kind of SCSI card can see it. Right now two machines (Lily and Artemis) have the card; we use Lily.

When doing a backup, first log on to the web interface ( http://128.169.5.238/) as "Admin" and see which tape is loaded. If none, use the operations menu to move one from a slot into "Drive 1".

Once a tape's loaded up, open a terminal on the appropriate machine and run the command "mt -f /dev/st0 status". If the machine doesn't have the mt utility, install it. The tape device will almost certainly be called st0, but if you want to check you can do something like "dmesg | grep tape". Assuming that command looks ok, do "mt -f /dev/st0 rewind" to be safe, then write to the tape using "tar cvf /dev/st0 X", where X is typically some directory.

YOU CAN ONLY PERFORM ONE WRITE OPERATION ON A TAPE. If you decide you'd rather have something on a tape other than what you originally put on it, you can erase it with "mt...erase", then do another "mt...rewind" and use tar again. Another useful command is "tar tvf /dev/st0", which lists what's on the tape.

One final note--the tapes are flaky as hell. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. If you're getting errors mid-operation, try restarting the tape drive. It works sometimes.

Regular backups of all of these will be placed on Tyche; from there they will be stored on tape. The system can be monitored at http://128.169.5.238/ , if you know the password; manuals can be downloaded in .pdf form at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/sl24 .

[Ref]

http://blog.chinaunix.net/u/22677/showart_492947.html

-- KevAdler - 02 Jul 2008

-- LeiYan - 16 Jul 2009

-- LeiYan - 20 Aug 2009