Paul,
I won't give you a complete course here about device naming in Linux, there is more than enough of that on the Internet.
If you have installed this SCSI card with that drive, you'll be able to access your tape streamer. The device name is /dev/st0 or /dev/nst0
The difference between /dev/st0 and /dev/nst0 is that /dev/st0 always rewinds after an operation.
Reading writing from and to tape is made quiete easy, and not as obfuscated as in Windoze at all. For example:
ls -l > /dev/nst0
simply writes the directory listing to tape!
If you want to control the tape streamer, use the "mt" command. Do a "man mt" to see what it does. Easy huh?
I am not sure that Amanda is the best beackup program for you if you only have a single server. I choose not to use it because it is much too intelligent, avoids to overwrite tapes accidentally etc.
I settled for "star" which is a somewhat extended "tar". You can obtain it
here. It does what it has to do. I wrote a neat script for using "star" which you can download
here. The script allows you to do incremental dumps as well. Read thoroughly thru the star man pages to know how, and what you should pay attention to.
This script overcomes the problem that star cannot backup over multiple file systems (that is, if you mounted a file system from a separate partition)
If you use star, whether or not with this script, be sure that you find out and test how to restore. You *can* restore reliably, but you have to know how to do it.
jlinkels
