APUNIX Exabyte Tape systems

[Richard Seegmiller]

Apologies for not seeing this sooner, but I've been busy with non-system
tasks and now that I'm back to this, it take a while to wade through 80 or
so back issues of this stuff.

We here have been using the mdump utility from APUNIX now for about 8
months and have had very few problems with it.

We have been using the Exabyte drive on our 3/260 file server using a Sun
SCSI-3 (si) host adapter.  The file server is running OS 3.5.  For OS 3.5
we use Sun's standard st device driver and our mdumps have proceeded fine
every weekday for the past 8 months.

Every day we perform a level 0 dump of the entire file server, in addition
to dumping every diskless client.

For the most (all) part, we have only had to use our backups because
somebody deletes his file(s) accidentally.  The restores have occured
without incident.

Recently we had to move the Exabyte drive to a workstation and use the
(si) host adapter for some other hardware application.  There were a few
caveats that APUNIX helped me work through, but the mdump utility still
works fine.  Though the dumps take longer, they still seem to be reliable.

My understanding is that the 3.5 st driver works fine, but that for 4.0.x
one should use the driver supplied by APUNIX.  Besides, the APUNIX driver
seems to be the best one on the market.  It is more likely to maintain
streaming than any other device driver for the Sun SCSI-3 or Ciprico host
adapters, since the driver is specific to tapes only.

Richard Seegmiller
De La Rue Printrak
phone: (714) 666 8033 x484
email: ...sun!sunkist!sol!richard

But then what do I know...I'm just a satisfied customer.