Amanda with floppy tape drives on Linux: 
(A.Gebhardt <albrecht.gebhardt@uni-klu.ac.at>)


Amanda now supports the ftape driver version 3.04d (see 
http://www-math.math.rwth-aachen.de/~LBFM/claus/ftape).
It adjusts the blocksize automatically to 32k and supports QIC volume tables.

It uses only one open() call for writing backups to one tape, so the 
"busy"-lamp of the drive will be on all the time. (With normal amanda
code it would be off in pauses between two files written to tape.)

For volume table support you have to get libvtblc first (Available at
ftp://pc02-stat.sci.uni-klu.ac.at/pub/Linux/libvtblc). This library contains
the functions and subroutines from the vtblc utility, distributed with ftape.
(May be, this library will be part of a future ftape package).

You have to set the raw tape device for volume table operations, usually
/dev/rawft0, either via "configure --with-ftape-rawdevice=..." or
with "rawtapedev=..." in amanda.conf (configure checks for /dev/rawft[0-3],
to get a guess for this value). 
Dont forget to make this device read/writeable for your backup user.

For compilation you need the header files from ftape 3.04d in your include
tree.

The volumetable of a tape "amlabeled" TEST-VOL2 with 4 backups on it
would look like (listed with vtblc utility from ftape):

gamma@backup[backup]$ vtblc
 Nr  Id          Label                   Date           Start      End    Space
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0 VTBL "TEST-VOL2             "  23:08:06 03/15/98        3        4    0.00%
  1 VTBL "gamma //beta/C 0      "  00:00:00 03/15/98        5      374    0.68%
  2 VTBL "gamma sda2 0          "  00:00:00 03/15/98      375     1029    1.21%
  3 VTBL "alpha sda2 0          "  00:00:00 03/15/98     1030     1906    1.62%
  4 VTBL "alpha sda6 0          "  00:00:00 03/15/98     1907     8092    11.45%
  5 VTBL "AMANDA Tape End       "  01:45:15 03/16/98     8093     8094    0.00%

With lvtblc, currently available with the libvtblc library, you can list 
the complete label strings 
(44 characters, not only the first 22 characters as with vtblc):
  
gamma@backup[backup]$ lvtblc -l
 Nr  Id          Label                                         Date 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0 VTBL "TEST-VOL2                                   "  23:08:06 03/15/98
  1 VTBL "gamma //beta/C 0                            "  00:00:00 03/15/98
  2 VTBL "gamma sda2 0                                "  00:00:00 03/15/98
  3 VTBL "alpha sda2 0                                "  00:00:00 03/15/98
  4 VTBL "alpha sda6 0                                "  00:00:00 03/15/98
  5 VTBL "AMANDA Tape End                             "  01:45:15 03/16/98

Note on datestamps:
volume 0    (amanda label): reflects the time of starting the backup 
volume i    (backup files): amanda datestamps of the backup files
last volume (end marker)  : reflects the time of finishing the backup


I tested this on a Linux machine (P90 / 96Mb RAM / 256 Mb swap) with two other 
clients (Linux / WfW) using

kernel 2.0.33, 
ftape 3.04d, 
amanda 2.4.0b6p4 

with an internal Iomega Ditto 3200 (TR-3) drive attached to an Iomega Ditto 
Dash controller (at 2000 Kbps). My "tapetype" follows:

define tapetype DITTO-TR3 {
    comment "Iomega DITTO 3200 Travan 3 tape drives"
    length 1500 mbytes          #
    filemark 29 kbytes          # ???
    speed 256 kbytes            # = 2000 Kbit/s ?
}

Note on filemark size:
Filemarks are not written to the tape (they are written to the header segment 
and use there 128 byte), so their size could even be 0. But a tape segment 
takes at least 29 kb (+3 kb ecc-code = 32 kb), so in the worst case an eof will
waste 29 kb.