UNIX Tape Drives and RMT

[Healy@space50.nrl.navy.mil (Liam M. Healy)]

    Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1992 17:43 EST
    From: gensym!mhd@harvard.harvard.edu (Mark H David)

    We have a 3620 running Genera 8.0 which we use as a file server.  We
    have been doing backups by copying the files onto a UNIX machine, and
    then we tar them onto one of these tape drives that holds a couple of
    gigabytes of data.  This is all well and good, but we would like to be
    able to go back to using the Symbolics backup software and have it
    dump the stuff directly to the tape drive.  It seems that our 3620 has
    an RTAPE protocol implementation with which it would like to drive the
    UNIX box (SPARC) tape drive, but the SPARC doesn't speak RTAPE.

    Does anyone know of either an RTAPE driver for the SPARC or an RMT
    protocol implementation (which the SPARC does support) for a 3620?

    Jim Allard & Mark David
    Gensym Corp.

What we do here to back up our LMFS on a DAT (4mm) tape on a Sun
is to NFS mount the Symbolics on the Sun, and back it up as if a local
file system.  One trick is to set
(setq nfs::*newest-versions-of-files-appear-to-unix-without-version* nil)
which insures that all version numbers are preserved, including the newest,
which is absolutely necessary if you ever wanted to restore the files
(otherwise, the older versions may overwrite the newer version on restoration).

The isn't quite as nice as having a remote tape protocol that both
machines speak, but when I set this up a year or two ago, there was
no such thing.  Maybe this situation has changed?

================================================================================
Liam M. Healy
Code 8242, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375
Telephone: 202-404-8338
Internet: Healy@space50.nrl.navy.mil