Sorry about the messy copy/paste and no threading - for some reason, I am on the digest of this list - which I don't like and I haven't found a way to switch from digest to regular emails...so I read the replies from Gene/Jon and have follow up...
Gene> > From the above figures its apparent that A: you're not using the > latest amtapetype, and B: hardware compression is on. > Useing hardware compression does this list of things: > Now, if I've convinced you to turn the hardware smuncher off, > be aware that a DDS tape, once written to with the compressor > on, is a bit of a problem child to get it to turn off because > even though you have reset the dipswitch to off mode, the > tape recognition cycle when you put the tape into the drive, > will find that flag on the tape and turn it back on for you. > Very thoughtfull of the drive, NOT! > What this means is that to get rid of that flag on such a > tape, one must do something like this: > mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind > # now, save the tapes label > dd if=/dev/st0 of=scratch bs=32k > # turn off the compression > mt -f /dev/st0 defcompression off (or -1 for some mt's) > mt -f /dev/st0 compression off > # now put the label back using non-rewinding device > dd if=scratch of=/dev/nst0 bs=32k > # and flush the drives buffers to force the flag update > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/st0 bs=32k count=130 (or more) > # now read the label out to stdout to show you its still ok > # but please note that all the other data on the tape will be gone > dd if=/dev/st0 > Re-run amtapetype after doing the sequence above to your > test tape. See the man page and give it the correct > estimated size as an argument. That will speed it up some. > Then do it to all tapes that are to be reused as you > cycle them thru the drive until you've treated all your > tapes to the no-compression as shown above. Or you could > make a script out of it and do it before fireing off amanda. > But be aware that the above requires root access, whereas > amanda will get her own, so its an "su amanda -c 'amdump > /configname/'" in your root script. ---- OK - understood - I am not one to piss into the wind...hardware compression off is the plan - Macintosh/Windows roots - hardware compression was easy, Linux/Amanda requires much more low level configuration than I had planned to ever learn but there is gain so I endure and bow to your great pearls of wisdom. Before I go any further, THANK YOU Gene & Jon for your terrific replies Anyway, I presume that I don't need the tapes, can wipe out curinfo & tapelist for this config and start from scratch, erase the tapes and not worry about dd'ing the headers off and back onto the tapes. Thus my specific questions... 1 - if I issue the command to turn off hardware compression... # mt /dev/nst0 compression off (or -1) or is it # mt /dev/st0 compression off (or -1) Must I do that each time I restart (as in add to rc.local?) Must I do that before I run any amdump? How often do I have to turn compression off? 2 - isn't the chg-manual script supposed to send an email to the mailto addresses in the amanda.conf when it needs another tape? 3 - is there any 'user' interface for Amanda such as a webmin module <http://www.webmin.com> or must I script out common operations for users? lastly, in reference to Jon's reply... >> Do I adjust the numbers of the 'length?' >> Does the length of 9675 seem small for a DDS-3 (125 meter >> / supposedly >> 12/24 Gigabyte or does formatting / filemarks / labels >> /etc cut 20%? > Adjusting the value of a meaningless number is an exercise > in futility. Exercises in futility is something that I seem to do well. Sorry but some of the documentation is spread out and I didn't find it all/comprehend it all but I'm getting it slowly. Thanks, Craig
