Question: Can amanda work as a tape manager for machines that
share a tape device (or tape library)?
If that question is unclear, here is some more information that might
help clarify:
I am assuming that:
1) I can have a 4 tape drive library (a Qualstar TLS-88132) plugged in
to a fibre switch
2) the tape library will appear as local tape device to every machine
in the fibre ("fabric") (or as many as I configure the switch to let
them see)
I'm hoping that I would be able to have 10-12 machines in the fabric,
and let amanda tell them when it's ok for them to backup to the tape
device (that appears to be a local device, but is actually shared by
all of the machines).
Things that I see that could cause problems:
1) if all of the scsi devices get exercised during a boot up, that could
problems if a backup is happening and one of the other machines boots up
(This is not really an amanda issue, though-- I'm mostly hoping that
someone on the list has enough experience with tape libraries to let me
know if this could cause a problem.)
Here is the configuraton I think I would use:
1) Host BigBoss -- configured as amanda server
2) Host anyClient -- configured with "--with-index-server=BigBoss
--with-tape-server=localhost"
What's more unclear to me is how I would actually configure the backups
(ie. one configuration that instructs the client to request _any_ slot,
or 3 configurations with fixed drives; and one drive kept in reserve for
doing emergency restores).
I searched the archives, and maybe I was searching for the wrong things,
but I didn't find anything that addressed the "fibre channel" connection
question.
-ron
