Tape Drive Sharing


For sending backups to remote tape drives there is the usual
traditional pipe methods through ssh/rsh.

Unfortunatly these methods won't work for me as we have a 3rd party
application that needs to access the remote drive as a local rmt
device.

I seem to recall a method for doing this by creating a special device,
but can't seem to find anthing on it that jogs my memory. I was
experimenting with this back in my AIX 4.2 days.

The AIX FAQ mentions a product called "DistibuTape" by Open
Microsystems that looked promising, however Open Microsystems seems to
be out of business and doesn't look like they had an AIX 5.x version
anyway.

Here's some info I found on that product:
http://www.marketingtactics.com/English/Clients/Open_Micro/19961113_OpenMic_Website/omiweb/usage.html

I haven't messed with remote tape drives for years as we pretty much
insisted on every system having at least one drive and use an
enterprise solution for daily jobs.

This has all come up again due to VIO's inability to share tape drives
and LPAR's requiring a dedicated SCSI card per partition. With 4
machine partitions and two PCI slots in the AIX BOX, it's going to be a
problem administrating what partition has what and moving them around.

Again, the 3rd party app is hardcoded to use rmt devices and can't be
modified to handle any kind of piping.

Is there anything out there that emulates what Open Microsystems had?
Any other ideas?

Thanks

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Tape Drive Sharing
    ... The AIX FAQ mentions a product called "DistibuTape" by Open ... This has all come up again due to VIO's inability to share tape drives ... problem administrating what partition has what and moving them around. ... the 3rd party app is hardcoded to use rmt devices and can't be ...
    (comp.unix.aix)
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    ... Currently are backup strategy consists of using ufsdump from two 280R ... servers to connect to remote tape drives on 2 E250 servers. ...
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    ... tape drives which aren't recognized from my mksysb restore. ... AIX Systems Administrator ... > immediately delete the entire communication, ... > Towers Perrin does not encrypt and cannot ensure the confidentiality ...
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  • Re: I killed my 7011-220........snif!
    ... Tim, you should be able to boot from your Exabyte 8200 tape drive, the ... only required to allow AIX to auto-configure the drive. ... Booting from one of these old tape drives was a bit tricky, ...
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