User manual QUANTUM DLT1LINUX

[. . . ] Your Linux distribution should provide documentation on how to build and install a new kernel. Reboot from your kernel and make sure that the SCSI adapter driver sees your DLTtape drive. dmesg is useful for examining kernel startup messages. You need the st driver st is the generic SCSI tape driver for Linux. If you have been using other SCSI tape drives on your Linux system, your kernel already has it. [. . . ] You can then select a particular archive to restore using the fsf and bsf operations provided by the mt command. This will let you locate a particular archive by seeking to the correct filemark using high-speed locate. Check if you already have the device-special files: # ls -l /dev/*st?crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 128 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/nst0 crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 129 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/nst1 crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 0 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/st0 crw-rw---- 1 root tape 9, 1 Sep 22 15:33 /dev/st1 If you don't see these files on your system, you'll have to build them using the MAKEDEV script, which is also usually found in /dev and can be set up using the following command construct: # . /MAKEDEV st This will typically make the device-special files for up to eight SCSI tape drives, st0 through st7. On some Linux distributions, you have to run MAKEDEV once for each drive, as in the following example: # . /MAKEDEV st0 You need the mt utility On Linux, mt is an indispensable utility when working with DLTtape drives. If you don't have it already on your system, install the mt package from your Linux distribution. Currently, there are at least two flavors of mt available for Linux. There is an mt-st package that ships with many distributions. GNU mt is another flavor that ships with Debian; there are probably others. GNU mt responds to a version inquiry in the following: # mt --version GNU mt version 2. 4. 2 For mt-st, the version inquiry has the following response: # mt -v mt-st v. 0. 5b We find that either mt flavor is adequate for performing basic operations on DLTtape drives. There are minor syntax differences, however. The first thing you should do after installing mt is to read the manpage. It provides a vast assortment of useful commands that are too numerous to list here. Testing your DLTtape drive If you've come this far, it's time to test that your newly-installed DLT tape drive responds properly to some basic commands. Perform an inquiry on the drive: # mt -f /dev/st0 status drive type = Generic SCSI-2 tape drive status = 1090519040 sense key error = 0 residue count = 0 file number = 0 block number = 0 Tape block size 0 bytes. Soft error count since last status=0 General status bits on (41010000): BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN You won't see the BOT keyword in the last line unless there's a cartridge in the drive. Tar a file to the cartridge, and attempt to restore it: # cd / # tar cvf /dev/st0 tmp # tar xvf /dev/st0 tmp Until you're sure your DLTtape drive is operating correctly, use test files that you can afford to lose when you overwrite them with a restore. Turn hardware compression off: DLTtape drives usually have hardware compression turned on by default upon power-up. [. . . ] The fastest way to do this is to pass the kernel the boot-time option st=128. Just specify append="st=128" for your kernel of choice in /etc/lilo. conf, run lilo, and reboot. Any time you rebuild the kernel from sources, you can also hard-code the buffer-size by editing the st_options. h file (it's in /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi). Look for the ST_BUFFER_BLOCKS parameter in this file, and change its value to 128 (the default value is 32 Kbytes). [. . . ]