IBM Tape Library (Autochanger)

[Melonic Overlord]

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience using Bacula/Bacularis with IBM Tape Libraries? In particular the TS3500 3584-L53 however I suspect similar models aren't too different. We only have 1 frame with 4 drives however I am struggling to wrap my head around configuring MTX for it and also configuring the library and drive paths properly. The library itself gets connected by 4 fibre channel connectors, so I'm also not sure how the system will register it. Disconnecting the library and plugging it into Bacula isn't really much of an option at the moment as it is still regularly in use with Tivoli Storage Manager so I don't know if swapping the servers for testing purposes would result in data loss.

I've been through and read most of the Autochanger documentation however there seem to be various different things that need tweaking in various different places. Not sure if it is also best to define stuff manually through the config files or through the Bacularis GUI.

Does anyone have experience / configurations that may work with this library? Any advice/guidance appreciated...

Thanks

[Marcin Haba]

On Mon, 2 Sept 2024 at 21:47, Melonic Overlord

Hello Melonic,

Welcome to the Bacularis user group.

For support for this specific tape library, I don't have a ready
answer, but I have a couple of generic advices for the tape devices
support in Bacula.

Bacula shifts responsibility for most of the tape device operation to
the operating system. Bacula works with SCSI tape devices available on
the SCSI bus. To configure the device files useful is to define udev
rules for changer device and tape drive devices. Alternatively there
can be used ready device files like here: /dev/tape/by-id. All of this
is for having constant device names in the system to use with Bacula
because the generic names like sg3 or nst5 can be variable between
system reboots.

Here are mine udev rules that in the past I defined for an old Exabyte
autoloader:

# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/55-bacula.rules
KERNEL=="sg[0-9]",
ATTRS{vendor}=="EXABYTE*",ATTRS{model}=="Exabyte 110L*", \
SYMLINK+="changer-exabyte-110l"

KERNEL=="nst[0-9]", ATTRS{vendor}=="IBM*",ATTRS{model}=="ULTRIUM-TD1*", \
SYMLINK+="tapedrive-ibm-lto1"

The script that Bacula uses to work with tape autochangers is
mtx-changer. It has a configuration file that enables to adapt the
script working to the changer. In many cases it is not needed, but
some devices require it. This mtx-changer script is used by Bacula
storage daemon and by Bacularis as well. So, if the autochanger will
work well with mtx-changer script in Bacula, it will work the same
well with Bacularis.

In Bacula you can find a couple of tests for autochanger and for tape
drives to check if Bacula will work with it well. These tests are
provided in the Bacula btape tool.

Once the tape library will work well with Bacula, here you can find
how to enable support for that in Bacularis:

https://bacularis.app/doc/brief/configuration.html#autochanger-management

Please let us know how it went.

Good luck!

Best regards,
Marcin Haba (gani)

[Melonic Overlord]

Thanks for this, I've done some configuration however I don't seem to be able to clear out the default Bacularis configurations (File1 and File2 etc). I've tried removing some stuff but it's not very happy about it in the Bacularis UI so I've had to put it back how it was. I've defined the autochanger in Bacula but it doesn't seem to be appearing in Bacularis. Do I need to add it a second time as per the guide you linked in Bacularis after I've set up Bacula?

Thanks

[Marcin Haba]

On Tue, 3 Sept 2024 at 13:16, Melonic Overlord

<melonic...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for this, I've done some configuration however I don't seem to be able to clear out the default Bacularis configurations (File1 and File2 etc). I've tried removing some stuff but it's not very happy about it in the Bacularis UI so I've had to put it back how it was. I've defined the autochanger in Bacula but it doesn't seem to be appearing in Bacularis. Do I need to add it a second time as per the guide you linked in Bacularis after I've set up Bacula?

Hello Melonic,

Thanks for your feedback.

For the storage File1 and File2, I think I know what you mean. After
removing the storage resources from the configuration, there are still
orphaned storage records in the catalog database. Bacularis uses the
Bacula database in read-only mode, it does not modify the db records
directly, only through Bacula. In case storage this function does not
exist in Bacula, there isn't any command to remove storage in bconsole
and even in the dbcheck tools. In this case, if you want to remove the
storage also in the db, then after removing the configuration, you can
remove the records manually from the catalog. This storage is a
specific case that works the same for Bacula and Bacularis users too.

For the question about adding the autochanger to Bacularis, yes, this
action is required. Bacularis and Bacula work closely together but
they are two separate applications where each of them has their own
settings. We tried to make this process simple by auto-filling fields,
but creating the Bacularis configuration is needed for that.
Fortunately it is a one time action.