On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 09:34:23AM -0500, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
> I'd like to run an new tape drive through its paces to make sure it is working
> full before I start trying to learn AMANDA on it. What are some commands that 
> i
> can use to write, read and generally get familiar with it and be sure it is
> working as desired? It is a Compaq SDT-9000 drive on Gentoo Linux (which
> requires devfs) and so it probably is in a non-standard area.
> 
> I've been reading around and have taken a lot in, but seem to be having 
> trouble
> organizing the information in my head. If someone would be willing to just 
> punch
> out some commands to help my brain stitch together what it's picked up I'd
> greatly appreciate it. I know mt and tar should be used. 

Unless that is a changer you pretty much have it.  Write some
write a tar archive to the tape and be sure you can recover it.
Then write multiple archives to the tape using the "no rewind"
version of the tape device.  Use mt to see if you can position
at a specific archive and recover just the one.

You might want to use dd with a blocksize of 32K to be sure
the default amanda block size works ok.  Similarly you might
want to explore the mt commands to set compression on/off,
block size, check status, set defaults, ...

If it is a changer, also explore the mtx command.

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