Operating a tape device outside of NetVault for troubleshooting (4047891)

Date: 02/2007
Affected NV Version: N/A
OS Version: Linux
Plugin version:N/A
Application version: N/A


Description: Occasionally, if Quest Support suspects a hardware problem, we will ask you to manipulate your tape library or drive outside of NetVault to verify that the operating system can successfully use the device. In Linux, there is an easy way to accomplish this.

Procedure:
Download a third party application called mtx (http://mtx.badtux.net). You can either download and install from the mtx website, or most Linux distributions have a version of mtx in their software repositories.

mtx is a set of low level driver programs to control features of SCSI backup related devices such as autoloaders, tape changers, media jukeboxes, and tape drives. It can also report much data, including serial numbers, maximum block sizes as well as do raw SCSI READ and WRITE commands to tape drives.

The following are basic commands to test the functionality of your device
In these commands, sg0 represents the tape drive, and sg1 represents the tape library.

#mtx -f /dev/sg1 load 0 1 -- Load the tape in slot 1 to the drive

#mtx -f /dev/sg1 unload 1 0 -- Unload the tape back to slot 1

#mtx -f /dev/sg1 status -- Status of what is inside the magazine

In addition to these commands, you can use tar to write to the tape.

After loading a tape, you can do:

#tar -cvf /dev/sg0 foo (foo being the filename)

Then to confirm the file was written, you can run:

#tar -tvf /dev/sg0 which will list the files that have been written to the tape using the tar command.