Tape backups over TCP/IP (was Re: ISC update)

[Piercarlo Grandi]

In article <1989Dec22.151132.19349 at antel.uucp> mike at antel.uucp (Michael Borza) writes:
    In article <1989Dec20.184947.3562 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at mcs.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes:
    >                                                We have a problem with NFS
    >which they say will be "fixed in the next release" -- even though it's a
    >one-line patch, and we NEED it (root mapping cannot be turned off in ISC's
    >NFS, and there is no tape server -- be wary of this if you intend to do 
    >backups across the net as this currently appears to be IMPOSSIBLE!)
    
    In the meantime, is it not possible to do your backup over raw TCP/IP? I
    don't know whether NFS interferes with TCP/IP (I'd be surprised if it
    did, but I've never run NFS).  Over TCP/IP, we use something like the
    following (run as root on the machine being backed up):
    
      # find . -depth -print | cpio -oc | \
        su bin -c "/usr/ucb/rsh tape_machine dd ibs=1024k obs=1024k of=/dev/tape"


Have you had a look at GNU tar? If you have a BSD compatible socket library,
GNU tar allows you to do remote dumps, spawning a remote magtape server (rmt)
on the machine that has the tape, and feeding/extracting the data with a TCP
connection to it, automagically. you just use as output file name
<host>:<device>. GNU tar is also quite fast...

It has only one problem, that it uses the dirent library, whose closedir()
procedure is broken under most System V version, especially if you use it
with a free() coalescing malloc(3) library. In any case the System V.3.x
dirent(3) library i broken in another way as well, so may well be advised
to replace it with the free sw one.

-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk