Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 17:18:24 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com> To: Shawn Barnhart <swb@grasslake.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Media changer relative movement? Message-ID: <20000925171823.A29921@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <001f01c02735$406f9ba0$b8209fc0@marlowe>; from "Shawn Barnhart" on Mon Sep 25 16:12:02 GMT 2000 References: <001f01c02735$406f9ba0$b8209fc0@marlowe>
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In the last episode (Sep 25), Shawn Barnhart said: > Does chio(1) offer any relative movement options when working with a > media changer? Nope. > For example, I have an HP SureStore DAT changer. With a tape loaded > into slot 0, I have to do the following chio commands to load the > tape from the next slot: > > chio move drive 0 slot 0 > chio move slot 1 drive 0 > > It's not a lot of commands per se, but I have to know what tape is in > the drive (so I can put it into the empty slot) and which slot the > "next" media should come from, which adds a fair amount of thinking > to a simple dump script. I had the same problem, and compiled "mtx" off of Sourceforge. It's got its own share of problems, but does have automatic "load/unload/next" commands, which really helps in scripts. > What I'm looking for is a "next" command to chio that would simply > load the next tape, either returning an error when the last slot was > reached or loading the tape from slot 0. I guess I'm looking for the > same kind of functionality that I had under linux with mtx. ... and I realize I should read more than one paragraph at a time :) Just compile MTX for FreeBSD. > Does this exist in chio and I'm just missing it from the man page, or > is a go-code-it-yourself-lazy-bum type deal? The functionality exists in /dev/ch, but only partially. "chio status -S" will show what slot a particular tape came from, but only if the underlying hardware supports it. Ideally, /dev/ch should store "current slot" information for autoloaders that don't support it, and it should also provide CHIOLOAD, CHIOUNLOAD, and CHIONEXT ioctls. Patches welcome, if you're desperate enough to code it yourself :) -- Dan Nelson dnelson@emsphone.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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