Hi Shaun,
I went through a similar process - initially trying to use VMWare's ESXi
server. The main issue appeared to be in correctly detecting both the
Ultrium 3000 LTO drive as well as internal SCSI disks on the P212/256 SAS
RAID controller.
Like you I also decided to revert to a native Ubuntu server install (10.10)
and the good news is that Ultrium 3000 via a P212/256 and LTFS all work
fine.
There are two things you need to do first however.
1) HP have release a new SCSI driver. It's been included in the Linux kernel
since 2.6.34 I think - but it's not enabled by default (I suspect this is
what was causing VMWare ESXi to balk as well).
For any HP server using any of the newer HP SAS RAID controllers (like the
HP P212 SmartArray) - you need to use the new HPSA SCSI driver and NOT the
previous CCISS block level driver.
If you install Ubuntu and are using Grub2 to load - then you can create a
new Grub2 menu item (which I've made the default) which contains the
following line (with your own root device).
linux /vmlinuz-2.6.35-24-server root=/dev/mapper/media01-root ro quiet
cciss.cciss_allow_hpsa=1
This will turn on the new HPSA SCSI driver, and disable the old block level
CCISS driver.
If you download and use lsscsi - you should see all of your devices
including the LTO tape drive listed with SCSI LUNs.
If you Google - " A SCSI-based Linux device driver for HP Smart Array
Controllers" you'll find HP's 'how-to' document on HPSA.
2) The next step is to download the LTFS source from HP here at
http://bit.ly/h9gXZo. Although HP and IBM state that they only officially
support Redhat and openSuse installations - it will compile fine on Ubuntu
(with all of the dependencies present of course).
The best place for documentation on LTFS including commands for formatting
and mounting tapes is here at IBM (since LTFS is an IBM led project I
believe)
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ltfs/cust/index.jsp
Under the 'Managing' section you'll find information for Linux and Mac OSX.
I was able to backup a large volume from a Mac OSX machine, and mount and
restore it fine to a Linux volume using LTFS.
Here are a few of the Linux LTFS commands for convenience...
#Format Media
mkltfs -d /dev/st0
#Force ReFormat
mkltfs -f -d /dev/st0
#Mounting media
$ mkdir /mnt/lto5
$ ltfs -o devname=/dev/st0 /mnt/lto5
#Checking media
$ ltfsck
After that you can use the mounted volume just like any other (well almost)
via cp. So far it's been very fast - and I'm pretty close to recommending
this as our preferred format for a video archive we're creating. I'm able to
backup about 500GB per hour - which is not bad and is about what the drive
is rated for. More interestingly - I'm able to restore a file from anywhere
in the backup set in just a few minutes.
To remove the tape just umount the volume (don't use the lfts command to
offline the tape) and then eject the tape.
Hope this helps...
Best,
Tony
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-amanda-users < at > amanda.org [mailto:owner-amanda-users < at > amanda.org]
On Behalf Of skolo
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 1:17 PM
To: amanda-users < at > amanda.org
Subject: [Amanda-users] LTO5 and LTFS
Anthony,
I'm starting to get into HP LTFS after getting an Ultrium 3000 Ext Drive
connected to a HP DL 365 G5 Server using a HP P411/512 card.
I actually tried first off using a Citrix Xen Server 5.6 host with the idea
of sharing the LTFS to a dedicated Virtual Machine client. However I was
unable to get the necessary Tape Driver software (cpq_cciss) for the version
of CentOS that Xen uses working. I can see the tape drive (/dev/st0) quite
happily, but no matter what I do I can't get LTFS to work
I'm going back to the idea of using a dedicated (physical) machine running
Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS connected to the Ultrium 3000 via a P212/256 and was
going to ask you what the process was for you to get yours up and going ?
One of the issues I struck with Xen was that I was not able to get fuse
loaded into the kernel (even compiling it from source). I am not sure if its
because it is loaded in by default and just not listed or whether something
else could be wrong. I am yet to tackle the physical server so I may be OK,
but thought I'd double check with you as you indicate that you had no
problems.
Any advice appreciated.
Kind regards,
Shaun
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