On Friday 30 April 2010 15:16:56 Jake Scott wrote: > Hi Kern. > > I'll take a look at the developers guide and get back to you, thanks for > the pointers. > > >> The features that I'd like to work on are : > >> - Automated configuration of storage devices in a library (using > >> serialization) > > > > It would be nice to have automated configuration of storage devices, but > > unless you have some trick, it is generally quite system dependent, and > > we try as much as possible to avoid system dependent code. In addition, > > storage configuration at all but the very largest sites is generally done > > once in about 10 minutes when initially installing Bacula. > > Most modern libraries can return the list of drives they have along with > their serial numbers. You can then match the serial numbers up with the > results of a SCSI device probe and auto-configure the whole lot (including > auto-detection of the device type with help from the inquiry strings). > > Even with a single host, a library with more than a couple of drives > becomes hard to configure as you need to know which drive index maps to > which local device before hand. When you share devices amongst hosts this > is gets very error prone. Also your device numbers sometimes change which > means you need to reconfigure manually -- if you have an automated method, > this is less of a headache. I'll dig into the library query details to > see how easy all this is..
OK > > >> - Support for native Linux changer device (more robust that MTX in my > >> experience) > > > > If it requires Bacula to send SCSI commands to the control channel, then > > it is very unlikely we would accept the code. It is much better to have > > such highly dependent system code in a separate program. If you can > > write better code than MTX, it might be worthwhile creating a new > > program. If Linux has some simple way of working an autochanger that can > > do everything that MTX can in the same simple ways that MTX works, that > > could be interesting. > > My limited experience of MTX is that its very very unreliable. Certain versions are a bit buggy, but most distros have now stabilized it so that we don't see too many problems. For those who are having problems, we release a version that we find reliable. > For > instance, my box here sometimes tells me that I have 2 drives and 45 > slots. Other times it does the right thing and returns 6 drives, 45 slots > and 12 mail slots. Yes, that is not too good. > > Try 'modprobe ch'. That'll give you a /dev/sch* device. The utilities > are available from http://linux.bytesex.org/misc/changer.html. 'mover' > uses /dev/sch*; I've seen this to be much more reliable using several > types of changer. Same with FreeBSD and its native changer device. I > think Solaris has one now too.. > OK, I'll see what you come up with, and although this is interesting, there are other points that you mention that *really* need someone's help in improving things ... Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
