Hi all,
I've been away from the list for more than a year, but I'm back for some
more help.  ;)

I'm setting up Amanda on my fileserver at home, mainly to back it up
locally, but I also have a couple other machines that I will do as
well.  I'm using an external drive, a Seagate STD624000N, aka the
Scorpion 24, with DDS-2 tapes.  It's running under Linux (nst0) and the
drive shows up as
  Vendor: ARCHIVE   Model: Python 04106-XXX  Rev: 7550

I'm just at the point where I'm running tapetype to get accurate figures
for my conf file.  I want to use software compression, so I need to make
sure the drive is not doing it in hardware.  There appears to be no
jumper or DIP switch setting for data compression.  Reading the manual,
there appears to be such a switch on internal models, but the only thing
it says for external drives is "the SCSI Mode Select command can switch
the drive into compressed or uncompressed mode for writing data
regardless of the position of the jumper..."

I'm not familiar with the "mode select" command.  Is there a way for
Amanda to do this whenever it writes to the drive?  I tried using what I
thought was the device corresponding to mode 3, nst0l (var. blocksize,
no compression), but got "could not rewind /dev/nst0l: No such device or
address" from tapetype.  But it's there when I do an ls.  I'm concerned
that if I just use nst0, and the drive defaults to hardware compression,
then it will screw me up.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Eric


Reply via email to