Thu, 8 Feb 2007 at 3:26pm, A R wrote

Server:
S: Debian Linux
2U - 6 SATA HD slots
Pentium dual core processor (anyone have trouble with dual core?)
2GB RAM (too much? to little?)
2TB of HD spooling space, RAID0 w/four 500GB drives
120GB of operating system space on RAID1 with two 120GB drives
LSI Logic LSI22320 Ultra320 SCSI Dual Channel PCIx card

I've no experience with Debian, so I can't comment on that. Dual core
works just fine. For future proofing and power reasons, I'd recommend
either Core2 Duo or Xeon 51xx (or ) over anything Pentium at this
point, but that doesn't have too much to do with amanda (which doesn't use
much CPU in generaal). Make sure your motherboard has enough PCI busses
and bandwidth for all the traffic amanda will generate. 2GB RAM is
plenty.

How you set up your holding disk space depends on how you intend on
running amanda. I run 2 simultaneous amdump's on my server (1 to each of
the LT drives in my Neo2K), and so I have 2 separate RAID0 arrays, each
with 4 spindles. 4 spindles/array may be overkill, but disk is certainly
not a bottleneck in my setup.

Loader:
ARCvault24 w/ two LT tape drives

I have both an AIT3 Powerloader and a LT Neo2K working quite well with
amanda. I see no reason why the ARCvault shouldn't work as well
(although, admittedly, I haven't looked too hard at it) After looking
at the manual, I see that the robotics are on the same SCSI ID as the
first drive, but a separate LUN. RH derived distros require an option in
/etc/modprobe.conf to get that working. I'm not sure about Debian.

note -- a quick look at the ARCvault24 docs doesn't show details on
the cabling for a 2 drive setup. To run both LT drives at the same
time, they *need* to be on their own SCSI channels. If you can't do that
with the 24 and you need that capability, you may need to look at the
Neo2K.

Good luck.

Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 03:26:40PM -0800, A R wrote:
Hi All,

I have been tasked with updating my company's aging backup equipment.

Loader:
ARCvault24 w/ two LT tape drives

I guess the main questions I'm trying to figure out are and is
the tape equipment that I have selected compatible with amanda? I
tried calling , but apparently they have never tested Amanda
against the ARCvault, but it clearly works with the Powerloader without
trouble. I see no mention of the ARCvault anywhere on this group, so I
figured I'd ask and see if anyone out there has had any experience with
that particular loader.

JB-L already gave a lot of good info. I'll just point out that for
the changer/drive to work with amanda the drives need to be compatible
with the mt program (almost a given) and the changer be compatible
with the mtx program. Amanda does little more than use these programs
for control functions and writes data to the drives.

may be able to confirm these more limited compatibilities.

February 8, 2007 3:26:40 PM -0800 A R <ajrmedic524 (AT) yahoo (DOT) comwrote:

--
Hi All,

I have been tasked with updating my company's aging backup equipment. I
am planning on purchasing a new server to run amanda along with a new
robotic tape library with two LT drives. I just want to make sure
that the hardware I have selected will work with amanda and the Linux
distribution that I have selected for this project. I have about 10 TB
of data to back up weekly. Here is what I have in mind:

Server:
S: Debian Linux
2U - 6 SATA HD slots
Pentium dual core processor (anyone have trouble with dual core?)
2GB RAM (too much? to little?)
2TB of HD spooling space, RAID0 w/four 500GB drives
120GB of operating system space on RAID1 with two 120GB drives
LSI Logic LSI22320 Ultra320 SCSI Dual Channel PCIx card

Loader:
ARCvault24 w/ two LT tape drives

I can't recommend LSI Logic SCSI cards. The drivers in atleast 2.6 Linux
are pretty ugly. Lack error recovery requiring you to power down the
machine if the card encounters a serious error (no, rmmod/modprobe is not
enough I found out).

After having lots of issues with an LSI card replaced it with an Adaptec,
very happy since. I can't recommend Adaptec's RAID cards though.
Especially not the bastardizations they made out of the ICP Vortex cards
(now ICP* models, not the older GDT* models).

AMANDA can use almost any changer, using chg-zd-mtx or chg-scsi. I use
chg-zd-mtx which is basically a set of wrappers around mt and mtx -- mtx
speaks the normal, standard SCSI changer protocol and I've actually yet to
find a SCSI changer that you can't atleast do basic load, unload, and
transfer operations with mtx. This includes weird beasts like SCSI CD-RM
changers.

And I don't believe with those SATA drives you'll be able to run the
library even with one tape drive at full speed. LT peaks out at
80mbyte/secI see 60mbyte/sec routinely in production, currently my tape
host can't keep up with that. SATA drives stream pretty well but AMANDA's
spool area access resembles random I/ not really streaming I/ and it's
really hard to keep tape drives fed at that rate. 10K rpm spindles might
be able to even on SATA

I guess the main questions I'm trying to figure out are Is this server
appropriate for the task at hand and is the tape equipment that I have
selected compatible with amanda? I tried calling , but
apparently they have never tested Amanda against the ARCvault, but it
clearly works with the Powerloader without trouble. I see no mention of
the ARCvault anywhere on this group, so I figured I'd ask and see if
anyone out there has had any experience with that particular loader.

Thank you very much for your time.

~Andy
--

Looking for earth-friendly autos?
Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! Autos' Green Center.

February 9, 2007 10:11:23 AM -0500 Joshua Baker-LePain
<jlb17 (AT) duke (DOT) eduwrote:

I have both an AIT3 Powerloader and a LT Neo2K working quite well with
amanda. I see no reason why the ARCvault shouldn't work as well
(although, admittedly, I haven't looked too hard at it) After looking
at the manual, I see that the robotics are on the same SCSI ID as the
first drive, but a separate LUN. RH derived distros require an option in
/etc/modprobe.conf to get that working. I'm not sure about Debian.

Debian probes LUNs by default.

note -- a quick look at the ARCvault24 docs doesn't show details on
the cabling for a 2 drive setup. To run both LT drives at the same
time, they *need* to be on their own SCSI channels. If you can't do that
with the 24 and you need that capability, you may need to look at the
Neo2K.

Good luck.

Fri, 9 Feb 2007 at 3:22pm, Michael Loftis wrote

And I don't believe with those SATA drives you'll be able to run the library
even with one tape drive at full speed. LT peaks out at 80mbyte/secI
see 60mbyte/sec routinely in production, currently my tape host can't keep up
with that. SATA drives stream pretty well but AMANDA's spool area access
resembles random I/ not really streaming I/ and it's really hard to keep
tape drives fed at that rate. 10K rpm spindles might be able to even on SATA

The first server I had my Neo2K library on had 4 7200 RPM SATA drives in a
RAID0, and it could easily keep up with 1 amdump run to an LT drive (I
saw 60-70MB/s to the tape). I didn't get a 2 channel card until after I'd
upgraded the server, so i don't know how well 4 spindles could've dealt w/
2 simultaneous amdumps.

Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 03:22:28PM -0700, Michael Loftis wrote:
I can't recommend LSI Logic SCSI cards. The drivers in atleast 2.6 Linux
are pretty ugly.

on the (NetBSD) flip side, I've had better experience with the NCR/LSI
(esiop) drivers than adaptec (ahc). the adaptec seems to give up pretty
easily on errors, and while it doesn't panic the kernel, it goes
comatose until a reboot.

who else is still making SCSI chipsets these days?

February 9, 2007 3:54:06 PM -0800 "Aaron J. Grier"
<agrier (AT) poofygoof (DOT) comwrote:

Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 03:22:28PM -0700, Michael Loftis wrote:
>I can't recommend LSI Logic SCSI cards. The drivers in atleast 2.6
>Linux are pretty ugly.
>
on the (NetBSD) flip side, I've had better experience with the NCR/LSI
(esiop) drivers than adaptec (ahc). the adaptec seems to give up pretty
easily on errors, and while it doesn't panic the kernel, it goes
comatose until a reboot.

who else is still making SCSI chipsets these days?

The LSI cards I've seen recently, in Linux land, are usign the symbios
drivers. Specifically the sym53c8xx_2 drivers in 2.6, and the sym53c8xx in
2.4, both equally bad. 2.6 Linux has other problems, like inabiltiy to
change/set compression without a tape loaded, same problem if you issue a
rewind ori think anything other than a status command via mt to a tape
drive, if there's no tape loaded it'll sit there forever, no CTRL+C
response or anything. Might be debian specific, not really sure.

I don't think anyone else is really left AFAIK. :( Sad.

Fri, 9 Feb 2007 at 5:25pm, Michael Loftis wrote

The LSI cards I've seen recently, in Linux land, are usign the symbios
drivers. Specifically the sym53c8xx_2 drivers in 2.6, and the sym53c8xx in
2.4, both equally bad. 2.6 Linux has other problems, like inabiltiy to

Erm, all of the U320 LSI boards use the Fusion MPT drivers.

change/set compression without a tape loaded, same problem if you issue a
rewind ori think anything other than a status command via mt to a tape
drive, if there's no tape loaded it'll sit there forever, no CTRL+C response
or anything. Might be debian specific, not really sure.

Compression etc can be tied to devices with stinit.