Share Tape drive between Solaris servers

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi,

I have two solaris servers running Oracle Applications. One is SPARC 5.9 and other one is SPARC 5.10
I want to share the tape drive attached to 5.10 with other machine so that i can enhance my backup strategy for backing up Oracle DB.

I tried to share my tape drive by performing the below which I got it from one forum

  1. On the server with the tape drive, you must share this drive to the other servers. Go to the /etc/dfs/dfstab file and enter the following line:
    share -F nfs -o rw /path/nameoftapedrive
  2. To share it out you must type the command: shareall
    note: you must be root to do all this.
  3. From the server you want to back up mount the tape drive to a local directory something like this:
    mount server1:/path/drivename /mnt
  4. back up the server info to that mount point which is your tape drive.
  5. unmount the drive

But i got the below error when sharing

root@KSEBSDB # shareall
share_nfs: /devices/pci@2,600000/LSI,sas@0/iport@80/tape@w500110a001392e28,0:n: Operation not applicable

Could you kindly help me on to proceed with this.

Regards,
Srinath

2

Here is a workaround - use tar and rsh (or ssh)
nfs is for filesystems, I have never seen it documented for use on tape drives. Tape drives do not have filesystems like disks do. Which is why you can use dd to write directly to a tape device. But not a disk device.

here is how to use tar to get files from a tape on the remote system back to the local system:

restore from remote

 rsh -n hostname dd if=/dev/rmt/0 bs=20b | tar xvBfb - 20 [ file list ... ]

files to remote archive

tar cvfb  -  20 [list of files ...] | rsh host dd of=/dev/rmt/0  obs=20b

20 is the tape block size: 20 bytes

3

HI Jim,

Thanks for your reply. I have to copy the entire mount point.

I have the below 2 mount points /db1 and /db2 on solaris 9

 
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0    70592505 63624124 6262456    92%    /db1
/dev/dsk/c1t3d0s0    70592505 42817688 27068892    62%    /db2

I have to copy these files to the tape drive on solaris 10.

I also tried the way you suggested for copying files under a particulat directory and i got the below error

$ tar cvfb -20 /dev01/oracle/patch/13496672/u13496672.drv | rsh 192.168.0.27 of=/dev/rmt/0n obs=20b
tar: invalid blocksize "/dev01/oracle/patch/13496672/u13496672.drv".
permission denied.

Regards,
Srinath