Solaris 8 - How do you format a DLT tape?

[Fibee]

Hi

We have a changed the density of our tape deck and the instructions say to 'format' the tape. How do we do this using Solaris 8?

Any help would be appreciated!!

Thanks

 

[KenCunningham]

I've never had to format a DLT. Is this a proprietry requirement for the tape drive involved?

 

[daFranze]

afak the DLT Drives write a few bytes on tape whenever you insert a tape into drive, that's why a tape once used in a DLT7k Drive never can be used in a eg DLT 4k Drive...

>> changed the density of our tape deck
did you replace the drive? Or did you just chance the density (usind eg /dev/rmt/0c instead of /dev/rmt/0)?

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years

 

[Fibee]

Hi

I am not a support person so I am trying to find out to assist our support guy! I think that our DLT tape currently holds 30gb but we have had a system upgrade and we now have 35gb to back up. We are aware that we can change the compression on our tape deck so it compresses the data so we can fit 40gb on the tape. This is through a menu on the tape deck. In the manual for the tape deck it says after changing the compression on the deck that we need to format the tape and we are running solaris 8 which we use to run our nightly dump to tape using the cron. We wondered if we could somehow use solaris to format the tape. We actually have a jukebox attached to our drive which would solve the problem because we could just put 2 tapes in but we tell solaris to dump to the device and it just fills the tape and then prompts for the second tape, as it only prompts for 10mins before it aborts and that this prompt is in the early hours we have a problem!

I hope this all makes sense!

Thanks

 

[KenCunningham]

Are you using the compressed device for the save (/dev/rmt/0c as daFranz describes above)? This should enable you to save 35 Gb easily enough. How are you doing your backups, ufsdump perhaps?

 

[Fibee]

Hi

The two main lines in our dump which I think are relevant are :

set tape = "/dev/nrst 10"
/usr/sbin/ufsdump 0uf $tape /apps


If we had c to the 0uf section will that allow us compression and if so what of?

Thanks

 

[KenCunningham]

It looks as if you have a link 'nrst10' in /dev.

cd /dev land do an ls -la nrst* to see what's available and where the links point. Post back here with the results. Adding c to 0uf won't have the desired effect as that just tells ufsdump what parameters to run under.

 

[Fibee]

Right I have posted the results below, it appears that we link to rmt/01bn for our tape device?

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Jul 8 2003 nrst10 -> rmt/0lbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Aug 8 2003 nrst13 -> rmt/1mbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Jul 8 2003 nrst18 -> rmt/0mbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Aug 8 2003 nrst21 -> rmt/1hbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Jul 8 2003 nrst26 -> rmt/0hbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Aug 8 2003 nrst29 -> rmt/1cbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Jul 8 2003 nrst34 -> rmt/0cbn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Aug 8 2003 nrst5 -> rmt/1lbn

 

[daFranze]

@Fibee

I suggest to run Backups with the device /dev/rmt/0cbn and try to find out wether one tape is enough; if it is not enough split backups to two tapes (eg save /oracle files to tape1 and "the rest" to tape2)
If this is not a solution use a backup software (eg Veritas Netbackup, Legato Networker, TSM, ...) which can drive your jukebox; maybe there are public domain solutions, but sorry I don't know them...

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years

 

[KenCunningham]

Or just change the nrst10 to nsrt34 in the script. Must say, though that this is the first time I've ever come across this nsrt stuff, so it may be as well to use /dev/rmt/0cbn anyway. As you're only writing 5 Gb more than your 30 Gb which used to fit on the tape, I think this should resolve your problem. Post back with the results.

 

[KenCunningham]

Fat fingers. nsrt34 should of course be nrst34 as any fule kno.

 

[Fibee]

Just to let you know our support guy has done the following and it works!

set $tape = "/dev/nrst10"

has been changed to :

set $tape = "/dev/rmt/0cn"

Our backup has now fit all onto one tape, thanks for you help!

 

[KenCunningham]

Excellent. We got there in the end!!