On Sat, 14 Jun 1997 12:39:47 Stephen Richard Ives wrote about "Re: tape Autoloader for HP SureStore 1":
> Excerpts from netnews.comp.os.linux.hardware: 11-Jun-97 tape Autoloader
> > Hi, I wish to transfert my backup procedure from our HP 745 to my
> > Linux box, but HP didn't port the MTX utility to Linux :(
> > Is there something else I could use, (or try) ??
> Well, I already replied just a few minutes ago to a similar message on
> comp.os.linux.hardware about this, but I'll briefly recap.
> I have a HP 6-tape DDS-3 autoloader at work, and we ran into the same
> problem- no mtx utility. However, after talking to HP tech support, I
> found that I could set the drive to mode 1 (the counter switch not the
> dip switches), which would make the drive act like one big long tape.
> This, unfortunately, didn't completely solve my problems. The drive
> wasn't autoloading the next tape in the sequence. So... I found that by
> doing something like
> mt -f /dev/nst0 offline
> the drive would unload the current tape and load the next one. So, I'm
> using that command in my --new-volume-script for tar, and I also turned
> on multi-volume support. It appears to work okay, but make sure you know
> where the data start and end on the tapes.
> Good luck...
There is a linux mtx port being worked on and it works fine on my linux
machine (sorry but I don`t have the ftp-server at hand at the moment).
As an alternative solution you could use a tool called scsi-changer, which
is a generic changer utility supporting not only tape changers. You should
find it on any of the major sunsite mirrors.
I`ve been working with this tool for a couple of months. From time to time
the tape drive gets locked up after a tape change, but this may be to the
Adaptech SCSI-Controller I am using.
Cheers,
Eckard Koch
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