Hi all,

I have an IBM x226 that I will soon be installing Suse 10.3 64-bit on. It will be a full LAMP installation and a Samba file server that will house about 700GB or more of data.

I am looking for a tape backup solution and may be able to get my hands on a StorageTek L20 tape library with two LTO2 drives in it. I MIGHT be able to get this all for free, but then I have to worry about what I need to run it. My questions are...

1. Where can I get drivers for this? Will I need drivers for the library, the drives, or both?
2. Is there any free software (Amanda, perhaps?) that can effectively be used to create backups on a weekly and monthly basis? Is Amanda robust enough?
3. If nothing free, what can I use?
4. I would also like to backup a few MySQL databases which will eventually be running. Never done this before. Can anyone point me in an informative direction regarding this?

Many thanks, folks!

Chris

Absolutely.

First step is to just get it running with mt and mtx in Suse. I don't have your particular library and drive type, but this is how I did it when I got a tape library and drive that was completely new to the market just over a year ago (AIT5). I started out getting mt to work so that I could do a dump or tar to the tape and read it back, controlling the library from the front panel. Then I installed mtx and got it configured to access the library. Once I could move tapes with mtx, I just gave Amanda the proper device names for the tape and the library and Amanda just worked.

As far a MySQL goes, you can organize your backups using ZRM (Zmanda Recovery Manager) for MySQL. It will do fulls and incrementals appropriate to your choice of storage engines for MySQL and put it on disk. Then you can have Amanda take those disk backups and put them on tape along with all the other things you are backing up using Amanda.

You can find links here http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup

I did a little searching, hoping that I could perhaps point you to an explicit solution. Most of the compatibility lists (for mtx, Amanda, etc.) are not all inclusive. They only include what people have taken the initiative to add. So, when you get it working, it would help others if you added it to the appropriate compatibility lists. For example http://mtx.sourceforge.net/compatibility.php .

I believe you might find drivers here http://www.sun.com/download/index.js...subcat=Storage , but if it isn't exactly right, it should at least have you in the right general area.

You can also look for help on the specific user lists for Amanda and mtx. I just did a search for storagetek in each of those archives and found (but didn't sift through all of these)

http://www.mail-archive.com/search?l...g&q=storagetek

and

http://sourceforge.net/search/?ml_na...rds=storagetek

So, let us know what happens. If you end up with some really specific questions with respect to Suse and drivers or something else, maybe some others will jump in and help resolve the details.

Thanks so very much for the help! I greatly appreciate it and assuming I can, in fact get this L20 (and then get it working), I will most certainly inform others of the experience!

Cheers,

Chris