On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 10:42:40PM -0400, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
> When you say Mac OS X doesn't support tape drives, do you mean that the 
> specific type of implementation expected by amanda is not supported? I'm kind 
> of blindly waving my arms in 
> the air, but it just doesn't seem quite right as a blanket statement and 
> leads me to question further. Could you humor me and explain in more detail? 
> And what does that mean for 
> BSDs in general?

Well, I base that opinion on findings around the web such as this:
  http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2005/Jun/msg00081.html
  http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-drivers/2003/Apr/msg00068.html
And the fact that my Mac systems don't, in fact, have 'mt' or 'mtx'.  I
recall reading a much more authoritative source, but of course Google is
not finding it for me now.

In detail, the story is that there are no device drivers (and thus no
/dev/ entries) or tape-related utilities (mt, etc.) on a Mac.  Macs do
have SCSI subsystems, and it's possible to attach most SCSI tape drives
to a Mac.  As you mention, Retrospect includes built-in drivers for
various tape drives.

It would probably be possible to write a Mac driver for a specific tape
drive or even family of drives (and the messages linked above suggest
folks have done so), but Amanda has been getting *away* from
device-specific support for a long time, and I think that's served the
project as a whole well.  The Device API will, of course, make this kind
of project a lot easier.

My apologies for my own hand-waviness at throwing that information out
there in my original email with no supporting evidence!

As for BSDs in general -- Apple has basically *removed* support that's
available in the base BSD systems, so no worries.

Dustin

-- 
        Dustin J. Mitchell
        Storage Software Engineer, Zmanda, Inc.
        http://www.zmanda.com/