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CHAPTER 11 Working With Jukeboxes
The Backup Professional jukebox module is designed to allow any utility or driver for a jukebox to be used. Some manufacturers provide drivers for their units. Some operating systems provide generic drivers for jukeboxes in general, and we provide utilities to drive other jukeboxes. The driver or utility to use for a particular unit on a specific operating system can be summed up in the following table.
TABLE 9. Recommended Drivers
Operating System Recommended Driver Optional Driver
SCO Unitrends Drivers juke
RS6000 Manufacturer's Driver Generic Driver
Solaris Manufacturer's Driver Generic Driver
Solaris 2.6 and above STCTL Driver1 Manufacturer's Driver
HP Manufacturer's Driver (mtx) mc
Dec Alpha (OSF) Unitrends Drivers Manufacturer's Driver
SCO UnixWare 7 Unitrends Drivers mccntl
UnixWare 2.1 Unitrends Drivers None
Linux - all versions Unitrends Drivers None

1. For Eric Berggren's STCTL drivers, contact support@unitrends.com.

When you receive Backup Professional, the recommended driver is the default for the platform you have purchased. The generic drivers and any manufacturer drivers would need to be installed onto the system before proceeding with the jukebox setup. You will have to manually install the Generic drivers provided with BP if you intend to use them. The generic drivers are shipped in pkgadd(1) format and can be installed with the following commands. You must reboot the system once the driver has been installed.

cd $BPDIR
uncompress $BPDIR/JukeGeneric.pkg.Z
pkgtrans JukeGeneric.pkg /tmp
pkgadd -d /tmp

Select the EXBTchgrs package to install. After the installation, you may remove /tmp/EXBTchgrs. Note: On Solaris, reboot using "boot -p" or "boot -r" to have a new probe and reconfiguration performed. Refer to the man pages for boot for your particular version of Solaris to determine which option to boot you should use.

11.1 Configuring a Jukebox

Select the <Setup->Configuration> menu from the Administration utility to configure a jukebox. You must first configure the tape drive that is part of the jukebox. See "Devices Configuration" on page 63 for a complete description of configuring a tape drive. From the Configuration Devices Dialog (Figure 50), choose the Devices tab and select the tape device that is in the jukebox.
FIGURE 50. Configure Devices Dialog

Click on the toggle box Use Juke and press the Save button to indicate that this device is part of a jukebox. The Jukebox Configuration Dialog (Figure 51) is displayed after the device record has been saved.

FIGURE 51. Jukebox Configuration Dialog

Follow the steps below to specify information about the jukebox.

1. Select the jukebox driver to use from the Interface list. This indicates the programs to use to access the robotic functions of the jukebox. The recommended driver is the default for the platform you have purchased. See Table 9 on page 153 to help you determine the correct interface for the jukebox.
2. Specify the path to the device for the jukebox armature in the Device Path field. Once you have selected the jukebox interface, the default device name for the changer will become the default changer name. The default name is an educated guess and nothing more than a starting point. If the path is not correct for the driver you have selected, enter the proper changer path.
3. Specify the number of tape slots for the jukebox in the Number of Slots field. This field may not be set to a value greater than the number of slots specified in your BP license feature.
4. Some jukeboxes have more than one tape drive. Specify the drive to use in the jukebox by number in the Drive # field. For multiple drive jukeboxes, the first drive is 1 the second is 2 and so on. If there is more than 1 drive in the jukebox, you will have to match the Drive # with the device name you specified in the devices Configuration Dialog. For example:
/dev/rStp0 could be device 1 or 2
/dev/rStp1 could be device 2 or 1
This really depends on the SCSI ids you set for each device.
5. A default jukebox slot configuration file is set in the Config File field. This file is used by an unattended schedule to decide which slot(s) in the jukebox to use for a given day's backup on the device. For schedules that are weekly, the Day column is the day of the week. Weekly schedules have elements 1-7 corresponding to Monday - Sunday. For schedules that are monthly the Day column is the day of the month. Monthly schedules have elements 1-31 corresponding to the 1st through the 31st of the month.
6. When performing unattended backups via the scheduler, the day of the week will correspond to the Day column in this config file. This is called the element.
For example, say you have a 7 slot jukebox and you want backups on Monday through Friday. This configuration file should contain 1 line per day of which slots in the jukebox to use for each day. So the weekly schedule configuration would look something like:
Day Slots Cur Slot Comments
-------------------------------------------------------
1 1 - This is Mondays slot to use
2 2 - This is Tuesdays slot to use
3 3 - This is Wednesdays slot to use
4 4 - This is Thursdays slot to use
5 5,6 - This is Fridays slots to use
today 7 - This is any interactive backups slot to use

Notice that on Friday there is more than one slot defined. This means that on Friday you can have the scheduled backups switch to the next tape as part of the schedule. This might be necessary to perform a complete master backup of all of the workstations on the network, while incremental backups during the week only require one tape. To fully use this feature, a client in the schedule must have its Next Jukebox Slot set from the Client Configuration Dialog. When the scheduler begins the client, it would then load the next tape from the jukebox. See "Adding Clients to a Group Schedule" on page 75.
This file can be edited at anytime. Exactly how to assign the slots to days will depend on your number of workstations and the size of the each unattended backup schedule for the tape drive
7. After you choose the number of slots in the jukebox, you can edit the config file by pressing the Edit... button, and configure the slots-to-days the way you want. If you are not sure at this time how many slots to assign for each day, you can come back later once the schedule is better defined and configure it accordingly.

11.2 Jukebox Implementation in Group Schedules

Jukebox support is tightly integrated with nightly backups performed through the scheduler. Implementing the jukebox module in the scheduler is quite simple. When you choose a device configured as a jukebox, START and STOP commands are inserted as the Before and After commands for the schedule. The group scheduler has the ability to run commands before and after the backup, and these commands are used to control the jukebox. This can be done for a new or existing schedule.

Jukebox support is implemented with three commands:

· START - Load to first tape from the proper slot.
· NEXT - Unload the tape and load the next tape from the proper slot.
· STOP - Unload the tape and return it to the proper slot.

The NEXT command is implemented at the client level. Setting the Next Slot toggle box in the scheduled client configuration dialog (Figure 23 on page 78) enables the NEXT command. This command will be run prior to the client being backed up. This will put the client's backup on the next tape. All policies apply to tapes as before. Recyclability, retention periods, and labeling are still performed as usual.

The actual START, NEXT, and STOP commands are defined in the Initialization file in the Interface section. You should only need to change these commands if you would need to incorporate them into a script that must do more than simply START or STOP the jukebox.

If you want to bypass or augment the default methods, you can roll-your-own script(s). For example, if you wanted to mail a message that the next tape is being loaded, you could make a script that would do the NEXT command and then mail a message to someone. To accomplish this you would make a script called $BPDIR/bin/my_next_script, and in this script run the NEXT command from the master.ini and your mail command. Then in the master.ini file you would specify the NEXT command as $BPDIR/bin/my_next_script. See "Before/After Commands Specification" on page 331 for details on these scripts.

11.3 Manual Backup/Restore Using a Jukebox

The jukebox can be used during a manual backup session. When you choose a device that is configured as a jukebox, the Before and After commands are filled in as:
Before: $BP_BINDIR/bpjuke -e today START
After: $BP_BINDIR/bpjuke -e today STOP

Notice the word today. This is used to lookup the element entitled today in the config file. In the example, the slot to use for today is 7. This will be the slot the tape will load from when the task starts. Or if you know you want to use Monday's slot instead, you can edit the Before and After command and change the word today to the number 1. Element 1 is Monday and in the config file it says to use slot 1.

Doing a restore from a device that is configured as a jukebox will cause the Restore facility to tell you what tape number and slot BP expects to find the backup. When the restore task begins BP will attempt to load the tape from the slot we last knew it to be in. Once the tape is loaded the restore will proceed and at completion, return the tape to the slot.

As a convenience in both manual backups and profiles, you can specify the exact slot number to be used, which over rides the above mentioned methodology. This means you can force the backup, for example, to use slot 1 regardless of the day of the week that the backup is run.

The way in which this is done is, in the above example, you would replace the word today with the word slot 6. This would be both in the before and the after command. The -e option represents the element and in this case the element is the keyword slot 6. You will note in the configuration file that you will see a keyword of slot 6 associated with the number 6 in this file. This will be at the end of the configuration file and is provided as a convenience to make the usage of jukebox slots more intuitive.


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