On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Jon LaBadie wrote:
On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 01:43:25PM +0100, Tom Brown wrote:
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.
Right now I'm using such a scheme, using IDE disks in `hot-pluggable'[*] IDE
bays.
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.
I gave the partitions on my backup disks labels using cfdisk, and use different
mount points. In /etc/fstab I have
| LABEL=backup-disk-1 /media/backup1 ext3 defaults,noauto 0 0
| LABEL=backup-disk-2 /media/backup2 ext3 defaults,noauto 0 0
I.e. the right disk will always show up at the right mount point.
My removable disks are much larger than my vtapes, so from time to time I copy
my vtapes (which reside on an internal non-removable disk) to a removable disk.
Right now all this is done manually, but my intention is to write some scripts
to automate managing vtapes on multiple removable disks.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
