Hello and thanks,

So it turn out that my suspicious were correct.
After rerunning amtapetype twice on our Solaris 9 server I got the
configuration for Ultrium2-LTO slightly different and with the new results
amlabel worked fine :)
In the first run I got the following result:
        define tapetype unknown-tapetype {
            comment "just produced by tapetype prog (hardware compression off)"
            length 207465 mbytes
            filemark 939 kbytes
            speed 17489 kps
        }
But Amanda could not identify my tape drive.

In the second run I got the following results:
        define tapetype unknown-tapetype {
            comment "just produced by tapetype prog (hardware compression off)"
            length 206819 mbytes
            filemark 918 kbytes
            speed 17477 kps
        }
which worked fine.


Anyway, I'll publish the results for the Ultrium-LTO2 tape drive on Amanda's
website.

Thx,
gil


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
[mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org]On Behalf Of Jon LaBadie
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 10:48 PM
To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Re: AMLABEL


On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 10:06:09PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 07 February 2005 18:31, Paul Bijnens wrote:
> >Gil Naveh wrote:
> >> Gene - thanks for trying to help,
> >>
> >> Currently the only reason that I can think of is that Amanda has
> >> not read correctly our tape drive so I am re-running
> >> #amtapetype -f /dev/rmt/0n
> >
> >Add an estimate value!  And it takes about 5 hours only. Without
> >an estimate it takes a week or so.  Like this:
> >
> >   amtapetype -f /dev/rmt/0n -e 200g
> >
> >On the other hand, writing a few bytes is enough to see it the drive
> >works.
> >
> >About the problem: you did specify that device in your amanda.conf ?
> >(I believe that was what Gene was hinting about.)
>
> Chuckle, yup.  Sometimes I get my tongue tangled up with my eyeteeth,
> and can't see what I'm writing...  Corrections in that case are
> always welcome. :-)

With the ultrium it is less important about considering HW or SW
compression.  But be aware that on Solaris whether HW compression
is turned on or not is determined by the device you choose.  You
will find lots of /dev/rmt/0"xyz" devices.  The "xyz" determines
the properties of the device the driver will set upon opening it.

Don't be fooled into assumptions about the various devices.  The
"c" device is listed as "compressed".  But that is the conventional
use.  There is no certainty that it turns compression on for every
device, or that devices without the "c" are no compression.  You
will even have a "c" device for drives that are not capable of
HW compression ;-)  Only way to tell is check the docs for the
drive and settings for the driver.  And then I'd check it if I
could.

--
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)