On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:40 PM, Jean-Francois Malouin
<Jean-Francois.Malouin AT bic.mni.mcgill DOT ca> wrote:
> * Terry Burton <tez AT terryburton.co DOT uk> [20081003 12:47]:
>> amanda-users, amanda-hackers,
<...snip...>
>> And as an aside, would anybody please care to comment about their
>> experience of running a split configuration on a single backup host
>> using a single changer library. For example, does chg-zd-mtx play
>> nicely with multiple accessors, or are there other, non-obvious
>> problems that make this a bad idea.
>
> I've been running multiple configurations on single server for years.
> Last year I added 2 changers with 2 LTO3 drives each in 24 slots
> library to backup +20TB of data. Each server has 2 config concurrently
> accessing the robot with chg-zd-mtx. It can be achieved with minimum
> difficulties if you have sufficient holding disk space and use tape
> spanning. Back in the days, I was even using a 8 drives library split
> in 8 configs and sometimes I would experience robot contention unless
> I was using some kind of 'ticket' so that only one instance of amanda
> would run at a given time. It was a bad hack but it worked reasonnably
> well given that this was pre-tape-spanning and care had to be taken
> wrt to the udp/tcp port range, etc, but this is all moot now as you
> can use bsdtcp authentication with recent versions of amanda.
> I'm sure others have done better (eg, think RAIT) so take this with
> a grain of salt!

Hi Jean-Francois,

I am now a little less concerned about splitting my configuration
based on your mostly positive experience, so I am very grateful for
the detailed description of your setups - thanks! It sounds very much
like the way things will be heading for us.

It would still be great to avoid manually balancing the DLEs between
configs in future if possible, so if any Amanda developers are able to
supply their thoughts the future of simultaneous drive usage I would
be most appreciative.


All the best,

Terry