On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:17:48AM -0400, Guy Dallaire wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Recently added an Overland LoaderXpress LTO 2 tape library to my setup.
> Inside the loader is an OEM HP Ultrium tape drive. My tape server is a
> centos 4.2 box (RHEL 4 clone)
> 
> I'm using software compression with amanda 2.4.5p1 already.
> 
> Problem is, the tape drive in the library always seems to have hardware
> compression ON. There is no way on the library operator panel to force the
> compression OFF.
> 
...
> Has anyone devised a way to force hw compression off on a similar setup ?


Fedora, and I presume centos, has a feature "stinit".
Once configured stinit creates several additional device files
for each tape drive (up to 4).  Each can be configured to
have several parameters automatically set when the device
is opened.  This is similar to the style of Solaris and HP-UX
magtape devices.  So I set my lto drive and my dds3 drive to
be initialized with stinit such that the "l" device (eg nst0l)
is always opened with blocksize 32K and no compression.


-- 
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)