Kern Sibbald wrote:
On Thursday 17 November 2005 21:00, richard wrote:
Hi List,
There have been a number of postings over the last few years mentioning
Seagate STT20000A IDE tape drives - has anyone managaed to get one to
work with Bacula?
FWIW - Suse 9.3 on Athlon 2600XP, Bacula 1.38.1 (and earlier versions)
<snipped>
running as ordinary user & with /dev/nst0 perms set to 777
mt-tools test runs but the "tar tvf" stage retuns nothing - tape whirrs
for a few seconds then prompt re-appears.
<snipped>
Any thoughts gratefully recieved!
I've seen this kind of problem previously with other IDE tape drives. The
problem generally is that the kernel driver was written by a IDE programmer
who normally programs disk drives, and those guys don't normally understand
the nuances (and there are many) of tape drives.
That said, it *is* probably possible to make the drive work by setting the
appropriate Bacula Device directives. This is not easy! It takes a lot of
intimate knowledge of each directive and what it does, and a *lot* of testing
time and effort. In some cases, if the kernel driver is *really* broken, it
will be necessary to get it fixed -- this happened in the case of several
drivers. Fortunately, in those cases, the kernel guys were very
cooperative ...
By the way, if you are getting an Invalid argument on a write() as you did, it
is most likely because the driver cannot handle the blocksize that you have
specified -- probably too big. Some IDE tape drives require fixed size
blocks, but cannot accept just any one. You might try the size 32768. In
fact, I would recommend to start with the OnStream tape Device conf that is
in the default bacula-sd.conf file -- it is also an IDE tape drive ...
Thanks Kern, I'll give that a try as soon as I can (probably over the
weekend).
BTW: Did you spot in the middle of my post (above): "tar tvf" stage
returns nothing? Is this normal - I'm not familiar with tar used for
tapes, but options tvf should list the tar to console? I saw the local
directory going out to the tape in the previous step and expected
something similar.
I appreciate that this points to a problem outside bacula but any help
from this list would be much appreciated.
--
Regards,
Richard.
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