Re: NEED TO READ AIT-2 Tapes created by SAMFS

From: Anton Rang (rang@visi.com)
Date: 04/09/03 

To: scott.bean@hsmv.state.fl.us (Scott)
From: Anton Rang <rang@visi.com>
Date: 09 Apr 2003 11:50:49 -0500

scott.bean@hsmv.state.fl.us (Scott) writes:
> Problem: I am going to receive AIT-2 tapes that were created by an
> outside vendor. These tapes were part of a library that was managed
> by a Solaris 8 box utilizing SAM-FS. My task is to to read the tapes
> and dump the data to our SAN. [ ... ]
>
> My solution: Purchase 2-3 Solaris workstations and AIT-2 external tape
> drives. Manually dump the tapes to disk, then move the files to the
> SAN.

You shouldn't need a Solaris workstation for this, actually, if you
can find a reliable version of tar for a system already on your SAN.

> If the tape were created with tar, cpio, ArcServeIt or other standard
> product I would be OK.

SAM-FS writes its tapes in tar format. Chances are all you need to do
are restore the tapes and move the files into the right place. You'll
need to know the block size that was used. By default AIT media
written by SAM-FS uses a 128K block size, but your vendor could have
changed it.

As someone pointed out, docs.sun.com has downloadable copies of the
SAM-FS manuals. (Actually, if you were getting a Solaris system, you
could also get a demo license of SAM-FS, but that's overkill for this
application.)

-- Anton

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