AIX

I only about the principle of filesystems from the very basics on Linux and Windows. But I want to know if it is possible on an AIX 4.2 to create one NFS on a server which is pointing to a tape drive (/dev/rmt0) of another server ?

This is because we several backups to do on a 5 servers that need to be done at the same time but we are limited in the amount of tape drivers (one per server). So if there was a way to write directly to the tape drives of other servers, it would cut down on how long it takes to do them all.

So I was wondering if it is possible to use a tape drive as an NFS from another server.
- we are limited in the amount of free space
- the only compress tool we have is 'compress'
- we have only one processor (CPU) per server

p.s.: I am currently looking on how to compress pipe to the tape driver directly but need to look at other alternatives in case it does not work

You cannot use NFS to make a tape drive available to another machine, what you can do is use something like rsh to send the data from your machine to the tape drive on another machine, look for mentions of rsh in the manpage for tar on your system, an example from: Unix tape archiver (Tar) is:

Code:

tar cvfb - 20 * | rsh boson dd of=/dev/rmt0 obs=20

where boson is the name of the remote machine with the tape drive attached.

For Solaris systems I would add a "c" to the end of the tape device name to denote using tape drive compression, not sure what one would do on AIX.

I am already looking at using DD to dump to tape but I am having problems. It is in another forum thread of mine.

But if what you are suggesting works on my client's AIX 4.2, then I have to figure out how to fix that DD problem of mine. It would be great if I could us this method.

By the way, what would by the bandwidth needed for this ? I have workstations with 10gb and others with 100Gb connections. Would it slow down traffic using the 10Gb ones with this method ?

AIX 4.2 with a 10Gb or 100Gb connection.....no!
Think again and post what you really have, 10Mb and 100Mb by any chance?

You can also think to use the /etc/hosts.equiv to grant other hosts access to the server that has the tape file. You'll have to enable remote root access. I did that with HP-UX and it worked fine, so in AIX that should not be an issue

The top data rate (and therefore bandwidth) will depend on the type of tape and tape drive you are using, it could potentially exceed 10 Megabits per second but I doubt if it would exceed 10 Megabits per second.