Using a HP C1553A Tape Drive under Linux by Victor Rehorst This document is meant to outline the installation and use of a Hewlett-Packard C1553A 24/48GB DDS-2 SCSI tape autoloader under Linux. Although it tries to be specific to this device, much of the information can be applied to other SCSI tape drives. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, yes, the HP C1553A 24/48GB DDS-2 SCSI tape autoloader. (Phew!) What a glorious device. Up to 48GB (compressed) of raw storage power. OK, enough with the harping already. The C1553A is a heavy-duty autoloading tape drive sold by HP as an OEM product to system builders. As of right now, its production has been discontinued, however HP still has support and information pages for it on their website at: http://www.hp.com/isgsupport/dat/c1553a.html Looking around those pages you'll notice that HP provides instructions and support for this drive under Windows NT, Novell Netware, and commercial UN*Xes such as Digital UNIX, HP-UX (of course), SCO, IRIX, AIX, and SunOS. Note that none of these UN*Xes are Linux. Meaning that we're on our own in setting up this wonderful drive. (Why do I keep saying it's so wonderful? Maybe because I'm backing up an enormous amount of data to it right now :) ABOUT THE DRIVE Let me first go through a few of the features of the drive. Besides its truely vast capacity, it boasts a high MTBF rating, and has a neat-o LCD front panel which gives you all kinds of information about the drive status. It also uses a special magazine which holds up to six DDS-2 cartridges. The recommended configuration is five data cartridges and a cleaning cartidge. But all of this is outlined on HP's website (see above) so I'll let you find out for yourself. (If you didn't get a special magazine with the drive, you'll probably have to order one directly from HP. Without it, you won't be able to write a single byte of data.) INSTALLING THE SUCKA' First thing we need to do is get the drive into our case. The drive occupies two half-height 5.25" drive bays (aka one full-height 5.25" drive bay). That is to say, it's HUGE. I have mine mounted internally, but then again I have an already-enormous full tower case. If you can't fit the drive into your case, you'll have to get an external enclosure for it. New enclosures are usually pretty pricey (upwards of $200) so try to grab a used one if you can. In any case, get it connected to your SCSI chain. The jumper and DIP switch setup is also on HP's site. (I might post my config here at a later date, if anyone has any trouble. AFAIK, the setup for DOS/WinNT should work fine) If this is your first time doing anything with SCSI, I suggest you read Warren Block's excellent SCSI tutorial: It'll help explain some of those weird terms you've been hearing about, and give you some setup examples. http://www.rapidnet.com/~wblock/SCSI/SCSIExamples.html OK, now you've got it installed. Start up Linux, and you should see your SCSI driver detect two new devices. One of them will be something like /dev/st? which corresponds to the tape drive, and the other will be /dev/sg? which corresponds to the tape autoloader. If the messages scroll by too fast and you're not sure if the drive was detected properly, do a 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi' to check your current SCSI configuration. One more thing you should note is the firmware revision of your drive. When you do a 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi' you should see 'Rev: 9608' or something similar. The Rev number is the date that the firmware was released: 9608 is the most recent. If your firmware is older than 9608, you should grab the new version from the HP webpage and install it. You'll need to create a DOS boot disk with SCSI drivers for your card. This is beyond the scope of this article, but if you have any problems e-mail me and I'll help you out. USING THE GIGANTIC PIECE OF HARDWARE OK, so Linux sees our glorious drive and all is good. Now we need some software to make use of the drive. I have tried the following backup software, with varying degrees of success: -Taper 6.9 - Seemed to have problems writing data, can't control autoloader, not recommended (but Your Mileage May Vary) -PerfectBackup 5.5.1 - Software seems somewhat buggy, especially when running under X, but is very feature-rich, offering backup scheduling, verify, indexing, cataloging, label printing (?) and saving options for later use. Also cannot control the autoloader, although on the web page they claim to have support for all HP autoloaders... there seems to be a binary missing in the Linux version. Recommended. -KBackup - Actually, I have not tried this software yet, but it looks pretty promising, and hopefully it won't do strange things like PerfectBackup does - If you've used this software I'd love to hear from you. Having said that, there's one other utility that you'll need to use your C1553A. It's called 'mt' and it should come with every Linux distribution. It's a little utility to send basic commands to tape drives, and it's the only way I've found to control the autoloader after the first tape is loaded. (After you load the first tape with the buttons on the C1553A, the buttons become 'dead' and don't work anymore). To load the next tape into the drive, you issue a command that looks like 'mt -f /dev/st0 offline'. The offline command will eject the current tape, and load the next one in sequence. There are lots of commands you can do with the mt utility; read the man page for more info. SETTING UP AND USING PERFECTBACKUP 5.5.1/X OK, since the only Linux tape backup software I've ever used has been PerfectBackup, here's how to use it. These instructions are pretty generic, and should apply to pretty much every tape drive. -Download and install PerfectBackup from . If you have problems, read their instructions, it's pretty well documented. -Run PerfectBackup/X. Start XWindows, and from a terminal type "pb" and give the big key a smack. (That's the Enter key.) -Setup. First you'll have to tell PB that you have a tape drive. In the Admin menu, go to Device Management. Click on the Expert button, which will transform into the Novice button. This unlocks the values at the left, which we will want to change in a second. Enter in values for the System Device Name (should be /dev/st0), User Device Name (whatever you want to call the drive, can be something like "HP C1553A DDS-2" or "Guster"), in the Type chooser select 4mm DAT, Capacity should be set to 4000 (since each tape is 4GB uncompressed), Throughput can be left to the default of 50.00, and Block Size should be 32k. Phew! Double-check everything and click Add. You should see your device appear in the list. Click OK. -Files and Options. Collect a whole whack of data that you want to dump to tape. Great. Hit the big DEVS button. Highlight your drive on the left, click Add, then click OK. From the Backup menu, choose Include Files. Here's where you can add either individual files, directories or wildcards to your backup set. If you add a directory, all files and directories within it are included. Enter a filename and click Add. When you're done, click OK. Next, pick Exclude Files from the Backup menu. If there are any files within the files you've selected that you want to exclude from the backup, enter their names in and hit Add. Done? Click OK. Next choose Backup Options. This will let you choose various options (duh). Choose Background if you don't want to see a status window while the backup is going (I don't recommend this). Verify after will verify the data written to tape: this will about double the time the backup takes. Compress will activate the hardware compression of your tape drive. Error Recovery will do just that: recover errors. The Backup Type box will let you do either a Full Backup (erasing what ever is on the tape), an incrememtal backup (adding new files onto the end of the tape), a differential backup (only backup files which have changed), or a Full Copy (I have no clue what this is). -Run the Backup. Once you've done all that, click on the big BACKUP button. The backup will start, and you should see your tape drive become active. PerfectBackup is somewhat of a resource hog, so don't be suprised if your system load jumps noticeably. -Other things. PerfectBackup has a bunch of other nifty features. The Estimate Backup feature will estimate the size of the backup, the time it will take, and what files will be included. The Save As Package feature will save a set of options so that you can quickly do the same backup at a later date. Show Media Header and List Media Contents will tell you what's on the tape in the drive. Well, that's pretty much it for now. Have fun writing humongous amounts of data to your shiny tape drive! Last Modified Tue Feb 2 22:06:12 EST 1999