Topic: BAKUP TO TAPE - WAHT NEEDS SETTING UP

[aussie]

I have been looking through the flexbackup postings.

I have created a fresh sme7 with HDA, CD on 2ndy master, seagate STT38000A - 4/8gb tape.

flexbackup -test-tape-drive fails for serveral things, so I assume the tape is not configured by default.

What do I do ?
(sorry if this is a double post - I HAVE looked through lots of info. about subtle problems but I am stuck at first base)

regards Aussie

[nmtrier]

I have created a fresh sme7 with HDA, CD on 2ndy master, seagate STT38000A - 4/8gb tape.

I believe that is an IDE tape drive.  You will need the ide-scsi module - see the following bug:
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788

[aussie]

I have created a fresh sme7 with HDA, CD on 2ndy master, seagate STT38000A - 4/8gb tape.

I believe that is an IDE tape drive.  You will need the ide-scsi module - see the following bug:
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788

thanks a lot! - but I note the bugzilla refers to 2.4 kernel and my clean sme7 is of course 2.6, but no matter

I 'see' the drive now, and it responds to mt -f /dev/st0 status and to rewind
but tar cvf /dev/st0 filelist fails! oh well one step at a time.

Aussie

[gbentley]

See below post ...

[gbentley]

Can anyone help out with this at all ?

Sony AIT-E IDE Tape Drive (Model ATDNA2A) set as Master on IDE0 on end of cable.

I can see reference to hda and modprobe ide-scsi enables mt to produce a status page as well as ejecting the tape, retensioning the tape and erasing the tape.

flexbackup -test-tape-drive produces a couple of odd errors ;

buffer (writer): write of data failed: Invalid argument (this repeats 3 times)
buffer (reader): failed to read input: Invalid argument (this repeats 3 times)

I have tried the suggestions in the wiki regarding changing block sizes for AIT to no avail.

/sbin/e-smith/# ./do_backup also produces errors ;

buffer (writer): write of data failed: Invalid argument

ERROR: non zero exit from:
buffer -m 20m -p 75 -s 32k -t -u 100 -B -o /dev/nst0 etc

ERROR: exiting

Backup terminated: backup failed - status: 256

Both 'mt -f /dev/st0 status' and 'mt -t /dev/nst0 status' produce a nice formatted info page.

[gbentley]

The below didnt help at all. Even a manual tar results in a Cannot Write: Invalid Argument

Getting desperate now .....


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Using IDE Tape Drives on SME

SCSI tape drives are generally recognized automatically by Linux and the 'st' kernel module automatically loads.

IDE tape drives require the sg module to be loaded. Older versions of Linux also required the ide-scsi module. Newer Linux versions appear to use the ide_scsi module instead.

Check that these modules are loading if you experience a problem with Linux recognizing an IDE tape drive using:

lsmod|more

This may not be the best way to force the loading of the sg module, but you can add this to /etc/rc.local:

# Load IDE tape drivers

/sbin/rmmod st > /dev/null 2>&1

/sbin/modprobe ide-scsi > /dev/null 2>&1

/sbin/modprobe sg > /dev/null 2>&1

[Stefano]

AFAIR ide tapes are /dev/htX and /dev/nhtX

HTH

Ciao

Stefano

[CharlieBrady]

I have tried the suggestions in the wiki regarding changing block sizes for AIT to no avail.

It might help if you reported exactly what suggestions you have tried. What value or values did you try to change block sizes to?

[gbentley]

From thsi wiki page ;

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:FAQ#Hard_Drives.2C_RAID.27s.2C_USB_Hard_Drives

Backups & Restores
AIT-1 Backup: buffer unreliable
An AIT-1 is unreliable if used with variable block size. Set the setting

config setprop flexbackup TapeBlocksize 512

I admit it was a bit of a stab in the dark ...