On Nov 11, 2007 1:24 PM, Sven Rudolph <sr1 AT loom.sax DOT de> wrote:
> following the ideas from the discussion some months ago I implemented
> just another tool for creating barcode labels for tapes. It is written
> in Perl and uses the Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript. Currently it
> creates labels for DLT and LTO (Ultrium). I'd like it to become even more
> generic, but the way of specifying the label layout is still a bit
> inflexible. So I first want to show you what I did, and you can tell
> me what is needed...

Neat!  As I understand it, this is a generic label-printing utility,
which could be used with any backup software.  The code looks quite
well-designed and extensible -- quite a feat for this sort of task.
Are you interested in further integrating it into Amanda?

The label-printing that Amanda supports is a bit inflexible -- it's
treated as a kind of report and (as you probably know) makes some
assumptions about the format of the postscript template.  It would be
interesting to see what kinds of label-printing functionality are
currently missing/difficult in Amanda, and fit this application in,
perhaps as an 'amprintlabels' that can be invoked from the 'amdump'
shell script.

Very shortly, perl scripts will have easy access to the Amanda config
API, as well as the trace logs (containing a record of which tapes
were used), etc.   So this script could turn into a full-fledged
member of the Amanda family of tools.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com