On Thursday 02 January 2003 10:44, Michael J. Pawlowsky wrote:
>Just wanted to know if someone is using this drive with Amanda.
>Do you have TapeType info for it?
>
>Thanks

Someone probably is, but your quickest way is to run 
tape-src/tapetype (after you build it with a "make tapetype"
in the tape-src directory)

However, its not a speed demon either since it has to write the 
whole tape to find EOT.  You can speed things up a bit if you give 
tapetype an argument thats an estimate of the tapesize though/

Be sure and turn off the drives compression else you get falsely low 
answers due to tapetypes use of /dev/urandom as a data source while 
writhng the tape.  /dev/urandom is normally not compressable and 
may in fact grow by 10 or more precent when fed thru a hardware 
compressor.

Generall speaking then, turn off the drives compressor, and leave it 
off.

Be aware that most tapes will have the compression state recorded in 
their admin header area, and to get those to the uncompressed state 
requires rewinding the tape, turning off the compression with mt, 
and then dd'ing enough dummy data to the drive to force a buffer 
flush in order to get that hidden header updated and the 
compression turned off for that tape.

Besides, amanda can put much more effective compression to use, its 
no farther away than the choice of dumptype to use in amanda.conf.
Here, even with compression turned off for those disklist entries 
that are mostly archives already, I still get an average 
compression ratio of about 40% of the original size.  Some dirs 
will smash to less than 10% of the original size.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.21% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly