Interesting. I had not used that feature of amadmin before (ie. marking tapes 
to not be re-used). I guess it would also have to exclude those. I suppose if 
this was in amadmin then setting up a script to email the output would be easy 
enough.

Scott..

Scott R. Burns
NETCON Technologies Incorporated
Suite 135 - 4474 Blakie Road
London, Ontario, Canada
N6L 1G7
Voice: +1.519.652.0401
Fax: +1.519.652.9275
Web: www.netcontech.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
[mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org]On Behalf Of Jamie Wilkinson
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 11:00 PM
To: Scott R. Burns
Cc: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Re: amadmin extension


On Mon, 2005-09-26 at 22:04 -0400, Scott R. Burns wrote:
> Using amadmin I can easily find out which tapes are required for tonights
> backup. I have runtapes set to 2, so the next two oldest tapes are listed.
> This works fine if I check things each day and load up the changer (HP
> DAT24x6) with the 2 tapes required. I have the changer setup with slots 0-4
> available for backup tapes (5 tapes) and slot 5 holds the cleaning tape.
> 
> Since our backup uses at most 2 tapes, and usually only 1, I can "tail -5
> tapelist" to find out the labels of the 5 oldest tapes, and load up the
> changer fully. Would this be a handy feature to have in "amadmin" maybe
> something like: "amadmin CONFIG chgtapes" or "amadmin CONFIG changer tapes",
> to allow for other changer commands from amadmin ? This would easily let my
> backup admin find out what tapes she can load up the changer with, and then
> not have to worry about it for a day or two.
> 
> For now I have a "tail -5" script for her but I thought for those with
> changers it would be a nice extension to amadmin.

This works unless you have some tapes set to no-reuse, in which case you
want to grep them out first.

You've reminded me of something we have, a little more complex than
that: attached is the python script I wrote for our backup server that
mails us (via the amanda user, so set up an alias) if we need to change
tapes from the changer, offering potential tape labels and suggesting
which slots they should be loaded into.

(Note that this script also doesn't cater to no-reuse tapes :)

Tested on Red Hat, running on an EL4 server, but should be compatible
with python 1.5.2.

-- 
Jamie Wilkinson
Senior Systems Administrator
Anchor Systems Hosting, Colocation, and Managed Servers