Greetings everyone;

What are my options for tracking LTO-3 tape media? We are sending more and
more LTO-3 tapes off-site. Some of our tapes site in off-site storage, some
in a closet next to our tape library, and of course, a good deal of the
tapes site in our tape library.

Keeping track of our tape cartridges is getting to be a real challenge. We
need a good inventory tracking system here, but so far, the only off-the
shelf product I found via googling seems to have gone defunct. I have set up
a pretty good manual system, but it definitely has to be temporary because I
will never get management to agree to let our operators handle the procedure
on an ongoing basis.

I have a perl script that runs on my NetWorker 7.4.4 Linux server once a day
that identifies tapes with data on them that needs to be sent off-site, then
it withdraws the tapes and sets the mmlocate field for each one to
"off-site", but receiving tapes back on-site requires me to manually update
the location field.

What I am hoping for is a system where I can have an operator swipe the bar
code that our off-site company uses, plus the bar code that NetWorker uses,
put them into a database, then have a script read the database and issue the
appropriate mmlocate commands to keep NetWorker in sync since we can't
always load tapes that are returned to us into our tape library.

Our off-site company is Nova Records. They have a system that does this, but
from the documentation I read, it would require a lot of programming effort
on our part, and there's no one here on staff who has the time to do that,
so I am looking for something that's very easy to set up and integrate with
NetWorker.

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

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