Month: January 2003

Spent most of the day educating myself about Ultrium tape drive technology and HP solutions which utilize it. Looks pretty nice. Ultrium technology is defenetely something I want to get my hands on (and I probably will within the next month or two). No cleaning (generally, apart from special cases), large capacity (100 GBytes native), good transfer rate (15-20 MBytes/second native), almost hardware tape verification (if I got it right), implementations from multiple vendors, open tape format, and few other nice things.

Something nice that I have been looking over from HP was a tape library module with 60 slots, with up to 4 Ultrium tape drives. Each module like this has 2 mail slots, which can be used to move tapes around other connected modules (up to 4 in this case). Good price offer. Expandable. Flexible, with good capacities (24 TBytes native, 240 slots, 16 drives). Touch screen control panel, SCSI, supported by all major operating systems. What else could a backup admin ask for?

Amanda configuration fooling around, miscelaneous bits are still restoring after the sytem crash, some DocBook, some cron, some LDAP, some whatever.

What are the chances of running mkfs on the wrong partition and tape drive chewing up your latest backup? 1 to a mil? Well, I got that today.

Luckily my /home was on a different filesystem and was not affected. I preffered a fresh install to the tape magic. With the proper kickstart took me less then 10 minutes over a 100Mbps network. Few misconfigurations caused few small problems like a couple of hundred of undelivery reports from my mailer, and the like.