Accessing Tape Drive on another linux system

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, amar_padhi wrote:

> Hi,
> requirement is simple. Two servers exist on RHEL 3.0. The tape drive is
> connected to server B. The databases are on server A. We want a direct
> access to the tape drive on server B from server A. This way we will be
> able to do online backups direct to the server B tape drive from server
> A databases. Redhat support informed that this is not possible, i.e.,
> tape drives cannot be shared across the network.
>
> I am very sure this is possible. This is a requirement which every
> multi-server organization will have and linux is more than capable of
> doing this!
>
> Do provide your inputs. Bottom line, how do I share my tape drive on the
> network (for linux servers only).

amanda - open source

akriea - commercial

cpiotool - per script

http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/N/NI/NICKB/cpiotool-0.65

the command-line

find . -print| cpio -oacv -C 129024 |ssh username at host dd of=/dev/st0 
bs=5k

Note that databases typically have to be quiesced before backup, there are 
various ways to do this, filesystem snapshots, interfaces between the 
database and the backup software (typically commercial) simply taking the 
database offline for the duration of the backup, etc.

I recomend getting a copy of oreilly's unix backup and recovery (which is 
worth it's weight in gold), and also perodically testing your backup and 
recovery procedures.

> Thanks!
> amar
>
>
>

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
GPG Key Fingerprint:     5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2