Use of the DDS Autoloader (HA55473) under SCO OpenServer 5

Unix Support have tested the Autoloader and found that at present it still does not work satisfactorily under SCO OpenServer 5.

SCO OpenServer 5 now has support for jukebox devices as they refer to them, these being autoloader tape drives and CD-ROM jukeboxes. Support is added by installing the Mass Storage Drivers package of the Advanced Hardware Supplement 5.1 which is available on the Insight CD-ROM under the /unix/images directory, or from Insight BBS in area39, as ahs51v1.dsk, ahs51v2.dsk, ahs51v3.dsk, ahs51v4.dsk, and ahs51v5.dsk. This package within AHS5.1 provides the jukebox driver (Sjk) and it’s associated juke command for manipulating media to and from the caddy assembly.

Testing has shown that at the present time it is possible to move a tape from the caddy to the tape drive itself with the juke command, but a SCSI error is produced when the tape cartridge is moved from the tape drive back to an empty caddy slot.

Other makes of DDS autoloader tape drive may well treat a caddy of, say four, tapes as one large single tape by merely loading the next tape in as the first one fills up. The unit supplied from Apricot however does not function in this way. It requires that the SCSI media change commands are used by the driver to actually change the tape. This means that even if the driver is fixed by SCO to function with our tape unit, a full system backup will have to be carried out in stages by the backup script to spread the data across tapes unless dedicated backup software from a third party designed for use with autoladers is used.

Open Arcserve backup software will be available from SCO soon. It is hoped that this will be a much better solution for the autoloader tape drive and will be able to offer a versatile and user friendly control of the drive. We will update this bulletin once this software has been tested or any other progress is made.

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