I've obtained a DLT-7000 drive fittediinto a Sun 'flexipack' case. It's
just a drive by itself in a standalone Sun enclosure - no autoloader,
etc..

I am going to check out a HP DLT autoloader this weekend though (someone
local is selling it), but in the meantime, I'm guessing some of you are
using stand-alone DLT-4000/7000/8000 drives with 'chg-manual', and I'm
wondering what your views on this type of configuration are?

The Sun flexipack box is a neat and tidy way to put a DLT drive on the
shelf at the back of my desk until I can find a DLT autoloader for my rack
that is actually affordable. Something like a Sun L1000 would be very,
very nice indeed but they're expensive and difficult to ship. 8-)

No problems with Solaris device creation, I connected the flexipack box
to the external SCSI controller on my Ultra 60 and did a simple 'devfsadm
-i st' and voila!

Are there any tried and tested tapetype parameters that I should be using?

Any other little niggly gotcha's? I see that the DLT drives are capable of
using a compression mode to increase data storage capacity, but if Amanda
is already doing that in software using standard Unix or GNU tools, is
there any point forcing compression on the drive as well? That would
actually reduce the reliability of backups IMHO since the pre-compressed
data being pushed out from Amanda would not be able to be compressed
further by the drive itself.

I know this is a topic frequently discussed in regard to DDS drives, but
this is my very first experience using a DLT drive, so the same comments
may or may not apply...

I hope everyone has had a good Christmas and will have a safe New Year.

Regards,

Craig.

-- 
               Craig Dewick. Send email to "cdewick AT sunshack DOT org"
 Point your web client at "www.sunshack.org" or "www.sunshack.net" to access my
 archive of Sun technical information and links to other places. For info about
     Sun Ripened Kernels, go to "www.sunrk.com.au" or "www.sun-surplus.com"