Chris Cruft

After getting the Compaq DLT drive working tolerably, it began to show signs of distress -like flashing all the lights and beeping like hell.  Amanda constantly reported one error or another.  Finally, I began to doubt the hardware.  Falling back to plan B, I installed an Exabyte 8900 (Mammoth) tape drive in an external chassis on suzuki.  See the section on tape drives for more information.

Now that I have the tape drive identified to the operating system, I need to configure amanda to use it.  I am going to simply follow step one from the procedure above.  A reasonable entry derived from the results amtapetype (after waiting overnight) are:

define tapetype ExabyteEXB8900 {

comment “Exabyte Mammoth EXB-8900 with hardware compression disabled”

length 18684 mbytes

#Rated @ 20 GB

filemark 0 kbytes

speed 2892 kps

#Rated @ 10.5 GB/Hour ~ 3058 kps

}

Also, don’t forget to change the following two parameters in the amanda.conf file:

tapetype

Tells amanda what type of tape drive is to be used.

tapedev

Tells amanda where to find the tape drive.