On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 01:43:25PM +0100, Tom Brown wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Not entirely and only related to amanda but i'm sure people have done 
> this before so here we go ;)
> 
> Linux amanda server (WBEL4) and its using filedriver for virtual tapes 
> as client does not want to spend $$$ on an LTO3 drive - a LOT of data here.
> 
> So anyone used USB2/Firewire external HDD's as their virtual tapes? How 
> does amanda/Linux handle this? I presume that amanda does not really 
> care and that this is prehaps more a Linux question but any gotchas? 
> makes to avoid? Does Linux mind hotplugging?


Only a single experience, for a client that wanted to transport
a pair of external drives back and forth from office to home as
"off-site" protection.  This was RHEL 3 and plugging them in
did not seem to be a problem, they mounted whenever they were
plugged it or powered up.  But it was not as if we actively
tested regularly plugging/unplugging.  The original plan was
weekly, so that was not an issue.

One thing that did happen to me during testing.  I plugged the
drives in one at at time and converted the disks to ext format.
Then began some testing.  Later the client rebooted and I did
not realize it.  I blindly continued some testing where the
first step was to clean out one of the drives (rm -rf /mnt/usb1/*
or some such).  What I did not realize that across the reboot
what had been usb1 was now usb2 and visaversa.  It depended on
the order they were seen by the OS.

It was time to experiment with something I had read about RHEL,
maybe other linux's too, that a drive can be assigned a unique
id, and whenever that id is seen, it can be made to automount
on the same directory.  Set it up and it worked like a charm.

Grand visions of amanda vtapes danced in my head.  Ten external
drives, each automounting on its own specific "changer slot".
But alas it was not to be.  The clients needs did not even warrant
using amanda.  rsync was sufficient and for them better.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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