Hi, > Nowerdays the people changing the disks frequently work at home. So it > would be nice to plug in more than one disk and have a tape changer scan > for more than one disk. I understand there is no changer included in > amanda which is directly capable of that.
Many many years ago, I wrote a changer that could use several vtape disks, each disk has a "disk label" and the configuration file will have the list of the slots associated to one disk. It is written in Perl and still works fine with my Amanda 3.3.9. I use it with disks mounted in the server, but I designed it to work with USB disks at first. It also has a feature that will send an email to Amanda operators if the needed disk cannot be find (but I would not rely on that part still working). It maintains a database of the various disks mounted in the system to avoid re-scanning all the disks each time, it will only do a re-scan when it finds a discrepancy. A more in-depth description is available at: https://www.cs.ait.ac.th/~on/technotes/archives/2020/09/17/managing_multiple_disks_with_virtual_tapes_for_amanda_ttchg-vdisktt/index.html I think that Amanda has evolved a lot lince I wrote that and now can use many disks, but I never really explored the need to change my configuration as my script is doing what I need. I run my Amanda server on FreeBSD (13.2-p5, I did the security update this afternoon, yeah!) but there is nothing specific to FreeBSD as far as I know (apart from the disk mount-points), As noted on the web page, it only uses one disk at a time (I wrote it long time ago, when vtapes where pretty new and multi-changer was not even a consideration). I can share if you want. Best regards, Olivier
