Ruby Tails > FWAJan 30

Hey~ Wanna see some tech gore? 

Here's the final result of installing my tape drive into the server. For something that looks cobbled together from an enterprise e-waste bin, I think it turned out great!  

Yes, I made a custom blanking plate that allows the fiber cables to run outside of the case. I know this looks incredibly sketchy, but I used a file so there's no burrs or sharp edges at least.

I also finally got the RS422 dongle tonight, which I wired up using part of the control harness from the tape library sled. Using moserial and the instructions provided from the github I found, I was able to configure the correct baud rate and parameters to send and receive hex code from the tape drive.

If everything works as expected, you should get "IBM" as the reply for sending hex 00, which I finally did after doing enough tweaking. Then I sent the magic hex string to tell the drive to switch to standalone mode.

Initially I thought it didn't work, but within seconds the drive rebooted itself and successful initialized! I was even getting green status lights and das blinkenlights from the HBA now! Yaaaay!  

Then I grabbed one of my tapes and inserted it, which the drive was more than happy to load and spool up. I'd say it's working now, hehe~

Now comes the next step of this endeavor. Getting the server to send and receive data from the drive, hehe~

Show threadsl1Jan 30
@foxyloon Internal FC? Oh, it's a drive from a tape magazine. Was wondering how I missed seeing internal FC connections XD
Show threadRuby Tails > FWAJan 30

@sl1 Yeah, I didn't have a proper enclosure so I had to improvise.  

I was looking for a reasonably priced drive and found this one for $110 shipped.

I think it was worth it, since I'm only about $200 in and I can backup 7.5TB of data on archive-grade tape.

Show threadsl1Jan 30
@foxyloon Ya! I actually have an HP library dual drive library with one bad drive... but it's only lto 4 or 5... should get that set up again
Show threadRuby Tails > FWA

@sl1 Oh, cool! I'd love to have a tape library to play with, hehe~

You know, you might be able to find a compatible used drive for a reasonable price!

Jan 30 at 3:15amWeb
Show threadsl1Jan 30
@foxyloon It was fun when I was playing with it before, but I couldn't find any solutions that didn't make managing the tapes a pain... but this was 5 or more years ago
Show threadRuby Tails > FWAJan 30

@sl1 Ohhhh, I can imagine. I remember when you needed expensive software to run tape backups with and the FOSS offerings were pretty lacking for tape libraries.

I'm gonna look into Proxmox Backup, see if that would be usable for my needs, but I'd imagine there's decent FOSS options now. Hoping that's the case.

Show threadsl1Jan 30
@foxyloon Hopefully, I should take a look. Nothing was really working with my FreeNAS setup back then too, without having to run a seperate jail/virtual machine to run the backup client