1AMTAPETYPE(8) System Administration Commands AMTAPETYPE(8)
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6 amtapetype - generate a tapetype definition by testing the device
7 directly
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10 amtapetype [-h] [-c] [-f] [-p] [-b blocksize] [-t typename] [-l label]
11 [-o configoption...] [config] [device]
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14 amtapetype generates a tapetype entry for Amanda by testing the device
15 directly.
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18 Note
19 The options for amtapetype have changed in version 2.6.1
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21 -h
22 Display the help message.
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24 -c
25 Run only the hardware compression detection heuristic test and
26 stop. This takes a few minutes only.
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28 -f
29 Run amtapetype even if the loaded volume is already labeled.
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31 -p
32 Run only the device property discovery.
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34 -b blocksize
35 block size to use with the device (default: 32k)
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37 -t typename
38 Name to give to the new tapetype definition.
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40 -l label
41 Label to write on the tape (default is randomly generated).
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43 -o configoption
44 See the "CONFIGURATION OVERRIDE" section in amanda(8).
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46 If a configuration is specified, it is loaded and used to configure the
47 device. Note that global configuration parameters are not applied to
48 the device, so if you need to apply properties to a device to run
49 amtapetype, you should supply those properties in a named device
50 section.
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53 Generate a tapetype definition for your tape device:
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55 % amtapetype -f /dev/nst0
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58 If the device cannot reliably report its comprssion status (and as of
59 this writing, no devices can do so), hardware compression is detected
60 by measuring the writing speed difference of the tape drive when
61 writing an amount of compressable and uncompresseable data. If your
62 tape drive has very large buffers or is very fast, the program could
63 fail to detect hardware compression status reliably.
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65 Volume capacity is determined by writing one large file until an error,
66 interpereted as end-of-tape, is encountered. In the next phase, about
67 100 files are written to fill the tape. This second phase will write
68 less data, because each filemark consumes some tape. With a little
69 arithmetic, amtapetype calculates the size of these filemarks.
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71 All sorts of things might happen to cause the amount of data written to
72 vary enough to generate a strange file mark size guess. A little more
73 "shoe shining" because of the additional file marks (and flushes), dirt
74 left on the heads from the first pass of a brand new tape, the
75 temperature/humidity changed during the multi-hour run, a different
76 amount of data was written after the last file mark before EOT was
77 reported, etc.
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79 Note that the file mark size might really be zero for whatever device
80 this is, and it was just the measured capacity variation that caused
81 amtapetype to think those extra file marks in pass 2 actually took up
82 space.
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85 amanda(8), amanda.conf(5)
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87 The Amanda Wiki: : http://wiki.zmanda.com/
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90 Dustin J. Mitchell <dustin@zmanda.com>
91 Zmanda, Inc. (http://www.zmanda.com)
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93 Jean-Louis Martineau <martineau@zmanda.com>
94 Zmanda, Inc. (http://www.zmanda.com)
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98Amanda 3.5.1 12/01/2017 AMTAPETYPE(8)