[NCLUG] suggestions for tape library control?

[John L. Bass]

	I have an Exabyte VXA 1x7 SCSI tape library that I would like to use
	under Redhat 7.3.  Can anyone make any recommendations for drivers as
	well as backup software to use with this? I have the SCSI media changer
	driver from http://bytesex.org/changer.html and am looking at Amanda,
	but would like to hear what some others are using.  Thanks, Robie

I've been using 4mm and 8mm Exabyte's under unix/linux for the last decade, and
still have EXB-10E's, 210's and 480's in operation here. There isn't any ideal
free solution under linux. Amanda is mostly only useful for scheduling single
tape dumps as long as you can keep the partition sizes small or do only incrementals.

If you have an excess of tapes and are doing some flavor of daily/weekly backups
driving the changer from command line scripts works as well as anything. This
works pretty well dumping remote machines to a large nfs spool area, then using
the scripts to archive the dump spool to tape.

Another solution which works well with larger barcoded libraries is a linux port
of SGI OpenVault - source is/was available - and recommended as this is a pretty
complex product. It has lot's of places to plug in site specific conventions and
backup applications.

There are several "products" which have levels of integration in between ... don't
remember the linux backup web page point right now.

John