Topic: flexbackup to floppy tape

[henry]

Hi Everybody,-

While upgrading to 4.1 I decided to add an old tape drive: Colorado 1400 with a dedicated FC20 controller card. But can't make it work.

(Win95 on the same box - replacing the hard drive - works fine, shouldn't be any hardware problems i.e. controller card or tape drive)

flexbackup (after being enabled through web manager) by default looks for a SCSI drive /dev/nst0; so I changed it (in /etc/flexbackup.conf) to floppy /dev/nqft0. But running flexbackup -newtape generates an error: "ftmt not found in $PATH".

Anybody dealt with such problems? Any solutions?
Could it be is ISA controller card that E-Smith doesn't recognise?

I haven't tried to attach it to the mobo floppy controller.

Any advice/comment will be appreciated.

Thanks.
Henry.

[Charlie Brady]

henry wrote:

> flexbackup (after being enabled through web manager) by
> default looks for a SCSI drive /dev/nst0; so I changed it (in
> /etc/flexbackup.conf) to floppy /dev/nqft0.

Please see http://www.e-smith.org/custom/. Don't edit configuration files. Change the templates if required. In your case it isn't required, changing the "Device" property of the "backup" service in the /home/e-smith/configuration database will effect the change you require.

> But running
> flexbackup -newtape generates an error: "ftmt not found in
> $PATH".
>
> Anybody dealt with such problems? Any solutions?
> Could it be is ISA controller card that E-Smith doesn't
> recognise?

There is no support for floppy tape devices, nor is there likely to be any provided by e-smith, inc in the future. Tape drives which connect to floppy controllers are too slow and too unreliable to be suitable for serious system backup.

Regards

Charlie

[Gerald Jansen]

Just don't understand why people don't go with the flow. The old FD20 wasn't a reliable solution when it was new. Why attempt to put junk on a reliable solution. Guess I have a tendency not to be politically correct. But why not appreciate and use e-smith as it is.

[Brian Barber]

AFAIR, ftmt is in the ftape-tools RPM, as is the ftape driver.  If you can track down the ftape-tools RPM and install it, this may solve your floppy tape issues.

Please let me know if it turns out.

BB