On Saturday 25 May 2002 09:09 pm, Brandon D. Valentine wrote: >On Sat, 25 May 2002, fil krohnengold wrote: >>Is there a way to utilize multiple drives in a single tape >> changer unit without splitting up the configuration? > >If you would like to use them in parallel then no, there is no > way to do it without splitting the configuration between the > drives. You could in theory use chg-multi to use your drives > serially but I see little point in that if all of your tapes > are in the same changer since you're still only using one drive > at a time. It seems to me there is little reason to own more > than one tape drive with amanda unless you've got multiple > configs going or you keep an extra drive around as a spare. > >If any of the amanda hackers have any better ideas I'd love to > hear them. I've often wondered how amanda could be made to > cope with this situation. It can't be that uncommon. Let's > say you've got some 19 tape Overland Data AIT library, and > you're running out of capacity in it, so you buy another > identical library which requires using a different drive to > access those 19 tapes. Seems a shame not to be able to specify > runtapes 2 and have amanda use both drives in parallel.
AIUI, amanda can indeed handle two seperate changer mechanisms with two drives. It can also handle the case where the changer has more than one drive, and can have an arbitrary number of tapes loaded from the same library stack into all the drives the robot has available. I haven't done it as such machinery is way out of my price range for my home system. But I'd suggest a carefull reading of amanda.conf, and chg-scsi.conf, plus the docs in the doc directory for ideas on how to do that. And be ready to hack up your own configs to make it do that based on the info there. I'd think its not a matter of splitting the configs, as much as it is setting up, in the case of chg-scsi.conf, multiple definitions in that file. Amanda is a very versatile girl IMO. -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 98.94+% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a hillbilly
